Marsh Hawk Press Blog

Eileen Tabios just released a new poetry collection, THE AWAKENING: A LONG POEM TRIPTYCH & A POETICS FRAGMENT (theenk books).  It just received a mini-review in the journal YELLOW FIELD #7 out of Buffalo, New York, as follows:

THE AWAKENING

Review By Edric Mesmer

Four meditations: spoofing on and getting off the modernist obsession with erotic contagion; dispatches from 9/11 for the poem that refuses to be written; the kaleidoscopic universality of pain as it dejectedly finds representation; a consideration of artwork by Filipino-American artist jenifer k. wofford. All these seeding our inheritances. The syphilitic metonym for a sexually-driven modernism is mirthful in its moves between hard-line phallocentrism and a lyrically-loaded vocab: “When I wish to soar from / the surface of words, I do not think of ‘Ezra Pound,’ // ‘penis,’ or ‘anus.’ I think of azure, kimono, aprocito, / adobe, Angkor Wat, magenta, anvil, silver moth …” From here there is a concentrated shift from the literarily investigative to the poetry of witness. Emails from September 2001 (incidentally, the author’s birthday) cohere in an antipoetic missive of community, synthesizing pathos. Ultimately, the collection must look at that which does not easily bear witness, as the many atrocities of modern poverty configure a media that cannot be or will not be televised. The poem becomes that televisionary channel-surfing: “… American press don’t buy these kinds of pictures. / Other countries do.’)” bleeds stringently back into triadic line. “Who determines what / leaves us / speechless? // Who—there is / a Who!— / determines // what’s allowed?”

You are invited to meet the poets of Marsh Hawk Press at the upcoming AWP. At the Book Fair, they will be at Booth 2800.

Five Marsh Hawk poets (details coming up) also will be reading during the AWP Bookfair Stage sponsored by the Adelphi University MFA in Creative Writing. Below are the details:

Bookfair Stage Event

Thursday, March 7

Time: 4:30 p.m. to 5:45 p.m.

Space: Alice Hoffman Bookfair Stage, Exhibit Hall D

We hope to see you there!

You are invited to listen to an opera based on one of Paul Pines' novels!

That is, if you go to http://www.tinangelopera.com, you will be able to hear an an aria from an opera composed by Dan Asia and based on Paul's novel, The Tin Angel. What a treat!

 

Eric Hoffman reviews Paul Pines' Dos Madres book, Reflections in a Smoking Mirror: Poems of Mexico & Belize, in BIG BRIDGE #16.

You can see the entire review at http://www.bigbridge.org/BB16/prose/proseehoffman.htm

Here's an excerpt:

Paul Pines' new collection, Reflections in a Smoking Mirror, includes both poems and short narratives that weave their way through various eras and landscapes, notably fixing its gaze on moments of transformation, capturing the tangled energy these upheavals bring. Pines' focus is on the various countries of Latin America, cultures whose character have been shaped by its many conquests and revolutions. A lyric poet, the various historical ruminations are filtered through Pines' unique perspective and careful, articulate voice. This lends the poems a distinctiveness as well as an air of familiarity, for while Pines writes knowledgeably and insightfully about these vastly different cultures, he manages to lend them a universality that allows the reader of any background the shock of recognition and the experience of what it must felt like to be among these people at such times of crisis.

Pines' presentation of the material is definitely non-linear, and follows a pattern of thinking that remains somewhat intuitive; poems lead into one another based more on an emotional content than on strict theme. It is obvious Pines has given the structuring of the book great care. I am reminded of Paul Blackburn's careful structuring of his works, most notably The Journal poems where the poems are both individual works, unique in content, but also discrete parts of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.