Monday, April 26, 2021

For THE HALO-HALO REVIEW's Mangozine--Issue 11

In addition to aggregating reviews from the internet, THE HALO-HALO REVIEW presents The Mangozine which features new reviews and serves as the online publisher for reviews and other engagements (e.g. book introductions) published in print but not yet available within the internet.  Other features, including author interviews and reader testimonials, also will be presented. The following presents a Table of Contents for Issue 11 -- CLICK on links to go to the reviews.

Submission deadline for the 12th issue has been set at Nov. 15, 2021 (though I will take reviews sooner than the deadline if that is more convenient for the reviewers).

ISSUE 11
(April 2021)

Editor's Note:  Welcome to the 11th issue of THE HALO-HALO REVIEW where we provide engagements with Filipino-Pilipinz literature and art and authors/artists through reviews and engagements, interviews and other prose. We hope readers, writers, artists, and publishers will continue to participate and share information about numerous Filipino authors and the wide variety of their writings. 

I.  NEW REVIEWS AND ENGAGEMENTS

Marcelina by Jean Vengua (Paloma Press, 2020)
Reviewed by Luisa A. Igloria

Reviewed by Neil Leadbeater 

You Are Here by Mabi David (High Chair, Quezon City, 2009)
Reviewed by Lawdenmarc Decamora 

OBJECT PERMANENCE by Nica Bengzon (Gaudy Boy/Singapore Unbound, New York, 2021)
Engaged by Eileen Tabios

Reviewed by Neil Leadbeater 


Mostly in Monsoon Weather by Marne Kilates (University of the Philippines Press, 2007)

Reviewed by Aloysiusi Polintan



Peirce/Marx:  Speculations on Exchanges between Pragmatism and Marxism by E. San Juan, Jr. (Kindle/sp, 2020)
Reviewed by Paulino Lim

Engaged by Eileen Tabios

Reviewed by Neil Leadbeater

Selected Poems by Merlie Alunan (University of the Philippines Press, 2004); Moon Over Magarao by Luis Cabalquinto (University of the Philippines Press, 2004); Museum of Absences by Luis H. Francia (Meritage Press and University of the Philippines Press, 2004); Misterios and Other Poems by J. Neil C. Garcia (University of the Philippines Press, 2005); Textual Relations by Ramil Digal Gulle (University of the Philippines Press, 2007)In Transitives by Isabelita Orlina Reyes (University of the Philippines Press, 2005); Almost Home by Myrna Peña Reyes (University of the Philippines Press, 2005); Beyond, Extensions and Commend Contend by Edith Tiempo (University of the Philippines Press, 1993 and 2010); and The Long Lost Startle by Joel M. Toledo (University of the Philippines Press, 2009)

Reviewed by Aloysiusi Polintan

Engaged by Ayo Gutierrez 



II. AUTHOR INTERVIEWS, POST-BOOK


Kay Ulanday BarrettMORE THAN ORGANS

Cecilia M. BrainardSelected Short Stories

Migs Bravo Dutt / The Rosales House

Leny Mendoza StrobelBabaylan: Filipinos and the Call of the Indigenous and Back from the Crocodile’s Belly: Philippine Babaylan Studies and the Struggle for Indigenous Memory 



III. READERS SHOW SOME LOVE TO FILIPINO AUTHORS

Go HERE to read:

Maileen Hamto on Ninotchka Rosca
Elizabeth Ann Quirino on Arlene J. Cha
Eileen Tabios on Therese Estacion
Maileen Hamto on Lily Mendoza
Elizabeth Ann Quirino on Deborah Francisco Douglas
Leny M. Strobel on Eileen R. Tabios
Maileen Hamto on Grace Nono



IV. FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE


Reviews & Engagements

Michael Leong discusses Court of the Dragon by Paolo Javier (Nightboat Books, New York 2015) in The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Poetry edited by Timothy Yu (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

From Books: Introductions, Prefaces, Forewo
rds, Afterwords and Author's Notes

Pravat Kumar Padhy presents Foreword to QUOTES OF LIFE by Radhey Shiam, edited by Rama Kant (Cyberwit, India, 2021)




Monday, April 19, 2021

MARCELINA by JEAN VENGUA

LUISA A. IGLORIA Reviews

Marcelina by Jean Vengua

(Paloma Press, 2020)

 

BOOK LINK


Now They Cannot Touch Her


In July of 1932, a 28-year-old Filipina named Celine Navarro (also known as Cecilia or Celing) was buried alive in Stockton by members of her own community—specifically, 7 men of the Caballeros de Dimas-Alang (CDA), a fraternal organization whose rules and rituals derived from Masonic practice. Celine had left the Philippines in 1918 with her mother and sisters. She eventually married a farmworker named Ignacio Navarro in 1924; the couple had 4 children. Ignacio was stricken with tuberculosis, and the children were sent to the Philippines to be cared for by their grandparents. Celine rented a room in a boardinghouse so she could be close to the medical facility where her husband was confined. 

 

That’s when the accusations of adultery started coming out of the community—though it is also conjectured that such rumors may have been started to teach Celine a lesson. She’d gone to the police to report how two men were badly beaten for sheltering a woman who’d fled from her abusive husband (a member of the CDA). Months after the conviction of those responsible, she was kidnapped twice by men believed to be CDA members. She escaped to Ventura, where her sisters tried to help her leave the country with her husband and return to the Philippines. However, she was taken again by the same people; beaten, thrown face-down and alive into an open grave on Jersey Island in the San Joaquin river; then covered over with soil until she suffocated and died:

 

                                    And they dug the grave by flashlight.

                                                                                                            (p. 16)

 

Nearly a year after, a man named Pablo Bustamante went to the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office to report the crime, which a gravedigger corroborated. They said there were even some women members of the Maria Clara Lodge (a CDA-affiliated organization) who actively participated in the murder of Celine. Her body was dug up on April 4, 1933. There were no convictions.

 

This is the narrative at the heart of poet and visual artist Jean Vengua’s lyric tribute and meditation Marcelina—It is a 31-page sequence weaving Vengua’s own visits to Stockton and the Jersey Island delta, with rumors of the crime, ghost stories circulating in the community, and fragments of news reports from 1933 that also capture the economic and social tensions seething under the surface:

 

                                    Slack Work and Low Pay Blamed for Move by

                                    Laborers to Return to Families and Old Friends.

 

                                    Paying                         .35/hr — Whites

                                                                        .25/hr — Japs

                                                                        .15/hr — Filipinos

                                                                                                            (p. 21)

What strikes me most in this reading of Marcelina, however, is the careful way Vengua gathers inchoate bits of story like someone panning for clearer residue. Her eye is sure as the hand that describes how, in this flood-prone area, the silt and mud bring in evidence of life, of lives; Celine’s life:

 

                                    …push mud from basements and kitchens
                                                before it hardens, holds fast to bones, pianos,
                                    mementos. pan to a close-up: woman crying. here, an old
                                                photograph under cracked glass; scour off  
                                    the mud. buried. was buried. unearthed or maybe returned
                                                home, face down, river grass pressed
                                 against the banks, color leached out, brown hyacinths
                                           choke the shallow irrigation ditch

                                                                                                                (p. 7)


If you lean your ear toward the “inward current, saline infusion/ of blood, silent sweep of the outward current” (p. 8), you find that what washes up from “history” (which we only think means “the past”) is no ghost but the re-embodied one insisting on the materiality of who she was/is. Materiality, as in connected to matter. Not just the dross items—

                        …the black earth, pear blossomings
                                     manure and fresh hay; …the morning
                        paper, steam on the windows                                                                                    

but also her brave intelligence, her generous concern for others. 

                        I am all right, so far, how are you all? Will I send for tatay
                                    first and then nanay, then Boy, the youngest,

                        and the children? …the grass …
                                    is not the same grass, the rice not the same

                        rice, the wind and the crops all different…

 

Moreover, her maternality comes to meet us, anonymous readers who open these pages and exhume her from the grave:

                        I am your daughter, your mother, your sister,
                        grandmother, great grandmother

                                                                                                (p. 11)

I recall that Dimasalang (or Dimas-Alang) is one of the pen names ascribed to Philippine national hero Jose P. Rizal. It means “one that cannot be touched.” It isn’t a stretch to see how it might also mean one who is so peerless that their authority cannot be questioned. In Celine Navarro’s case, it was an authority that decided she should be punished and not allowed to live because of her alleged transgressions against patriarchy and community. But thanks to Jean Vengua’s reclamation, we can embrace a woman whose significance is more lucid than a rumor, larger than the fate to which she was unjustly consigned.

 

*****

Luisa A. Igloria is the author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018), and 12 other books. Luisa was the inaugural recipient of the 2015 Resurgence Poetry Prize (UK) for ecopoetry, and is a Louis I. Jaffe Professor of English and Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Old Dominion University. She also leads workshops for The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. In July 2020, she was appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia.  www.luisaigloria.com




Sunday, April 18, 2021

DOVELION: A FAIRY TALE FOR OUR TIMES by EILEEN R. TABIOS (1)

NEIL LEADBEATER Reviews


DOVELION: A Fairy Tale For Our Times by Eileen R. Tabios 

(ACBooks, New York, 2021)

 

BOOK LINK


Over 20 years in the making, DOVELION: A Fairy Tale for Our Times is Tabios’ first full-length novel. DOVELION expands the genre known as autofiction which is defined in literary circles as a form of fictionalized autobiography. Autofiction is said to have originated in France where the term was coined as far back as 1977 with reference to Serge Doubrovky’s novel Fils.  In the USA, its proponents include novelists such as Sheila Heti, Teju Cole, Jenny Offill and Tao Lin. Autofiction in its strictest sense requires a first-person narrative by a protagonist who has the same name as the author and it combines two mutually inconsistent narrative forms, namely autobiography and fiction. In an article entitled ‘Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Tao Lin: How ‘Auto’ is ‘Autofiction’? [Vulture, May 11, 2018], Christian Lorentzen states that ‘the way the term is used tends to be unstable which makes sense for a genre that blends fiction and what may appear to be fact into an unstable compound’.

Written through the medium of traditional narrative and experimental fictionDOVELION tells the story of poet Elena Theeland who overcomes the trauma of her past to raise a family that overthrows the dictatorship in Pacifica. She is aided in this by artist Ernst Blazer whose father, a CIA spy, instigated the murder of Elena’s father, a rebel leader. As her family frees Pacifica from the dictator’s dynastic regime, Elena discovers herself to be a member of an indigenous tribe once thought to be erased through genocide. The discovery reveals her life to epitomize the birth of a modern-day “Baybay” modelled after the “Babaylan,” an indigenous spiritual and community leader of the Philippines. 

The title “DOVELION” refers to the fictional country of Pacifica. Its name was inspired by José Garcia Villa’s coining of “Doveglion”—an abbreviated reference to ‘Dove, Eagle and Lion” (Tabios' title is missing the "g" and the novel's reference to it will be based on dove and lion without the eagle.) The novel is for the Philippines, the author’s country of birth that she says she “refuses to define as Loss.” 


The fairy tale element surfaces in the references to Rapunzel (a sequence of poems extracted from Tabios’ poetry collection Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole) and Pacifica’s popular childhood tale of an emerald island with a sapphire ocean and a 24-carat sun. The narrator questions whether paradise is a fairy tale itself—an illusion. After all, Adam and Eve never returned to Eden.

True to most fairy tales, the novel opens with the traditional phrase “once upon a time” but there is nothing traditional about this novel which is at once inventive and experimental. How many times, for example, can a writer get away with describing a young woman approaching a threshold and pressing a button on an intercom to gain entry to Apartment 3J? The answer is again and again and again. Each time the reader is given a little bit more information and each time the reader is kept in suspense. There is something portentous, if not symbolic, about crossing a threshold. Tabios takes this to new heights by exploring the threshold of pain: how much a human being can withstand pain through living with actions that can have long-lasting repercussions. The repetitive, formulaic patterns seen in Part I recur in Part II “leaving darkness for light” and in other chapters where “a dictator made me an orphan. To be an orphan is to be unsure” and in Part III “Once upon a time I woke up and I was old…” These mantras punctuate multiple arrivals. The use of repetition applied in different forms throughout the novel is akin to the musical equivalent of a set of variations on a theme.

Structurally, the novel is written in the form of a series of diary entries, almost like a personal journal. Significantly, the start begins at the end of a year and none of the months move in any known logical sequence. The protagonist’s devotion to truth is obsessive which is why each entry gives the date and the month but curiously not the year. This seeming omission reflects the fact that time, referred to as “Kapwa Time, where past, present and future meld into a singular now.” As if to underline this concept, Part I of the novel is titled “THERE WAS IS,” Part II “THERE BECAME IS,” and Part III “THERE WILL BE IS.”  Even the numbers in a list poem, “The Return of Dovelion” rebel against an inherited order.

In Filipino psychology Kapwa is a recognition of a shared identity, an inner self, shared with others. It signifies time spent connecting and having a shared sense of identity, a shared inner self, with someone else in which “all is one and one is all.”

 

Throughout the novel there are forays into modern art: blank canvasses, broken frames, wire sculptures and small square paintings with pale centers whose edges vibrate with vivid colors. Even the building that the narrator visits regularly over a two year period gains iconic status as a structure of steel and glass. In Part II, she sees the building as what it was, what it is. It has played such a central role in her life. Tabios’ novel is very visual. In it, paintings embody what the narrator wants to do through words. “The viewer,” she says, “is primary. The viewer’s response is what uplifts the viewer’s experience.” Monochromes apart, the narrator exclaims “I want to live in Technicolor.”

Sentences, often written in the form of philosophical statements, that struck a chord with me while reading the novel included the following: 

“Evil begets evil until redemption surfaces,” 

“The person who forgives will benefit as much as who is forgiven,” 

“Everything. Is. Political. And. Everything. And. Everyone. Is. But. A. Cog. To. This. Systemic. Obscenity,”

and the one I liked the most, which occurs when the narrator’s daughter, aged 23, tells her mother that she does not know what to do with her life, is when the mother replies, 

“Just know that you’re worthwhile because you exist.”


Helpful, informative notes are supplied at the end because “all stories bear appendices, notes, footnotes and postscripts” and this one is no exception. 

Cleverly put together, this novel will appeal to all those who are interested in autofiction and its future as a literary genre.

 

*****


Neil Leadbeater is an author, editor, essayist, poet and critic living in Edinburgh, Scotland. His short stories, articles and poems have been published widely in anthologies and journals both at home and abroad. His books include Hoarding Conkers at Hailes Abbey (Littoral Press, 2010), Librettos for the Black Madonna (White Adder Press, 2011); The Worcester Fragments (Original Plus, 2013); The Loveliest Vein of Our Lives (Poetry Space, 2014); Finding the River Horse (Littoral Press, 2017); Penn Fields (Littoral Press, 2019) and Reading Between The Lines (Littoral Press, 2020). His work has been translated into French, Dutch, Nepali, Romanian, Spanish and Swedish.

 

 

Friday, April 16, 2021

YOU ARE HERE by MABI DAVID

LAWDENMARC DECAMORA Reviews 



You Are Here by Mabi David

(High Chair, Quezon City, 2009)



“to make way for a different order, a better city plan” starts the first installment of Mabi David’s historical pronouncement on the narratives of war alongside an ironic representation of metaphorical afterlives inherent in barracks, tunnels, the threatened town of Simacolong, and names of soldiers catapulted into a sea of anonymity. All these murky imprints speculate a kind of memorial “staging” that can relax if not totally blur the borders of the inside-outside dialectic confronting sites of memory such as, among other locations, heritage places. But how can one forget the horrors of the past if the literary and medial (following Astrid Erll’s argument) afterlives of the “traumatic past” continue to frame our consciousness? Everyday texts and the collective memory seem to articulate stories in pure abstractions.            

In David’s sophomore collection You Are Here, the function of ‘here’ evokes the capacious memory of the speaker to unpack the narrow depictions of social history. The speaker sees characters, symbols and different sites of memory reminiscent of war, but this simplistic act of seeing provides a double-rider since remembering and forgetting widen the space of narration. This critical broadening of the identity and function of the here persona rather than an in-here persona, is an assurance that someone is potentially constructing a meaning, an experience, an idea. Instead of the persona articulating “As it was is as it should be” as the docile reality at large, such rational insight nonetheless makes his space of subsistence indisputably humane and inherent—that is, of the expressive contriving with the “I”- grounded self—simply because he does not merely narrate history but rather constructs his story or his material longing for the word: how it foregrounds memory space and identity. His rebuttal thus speaks of spatial signification in “Itinerary”, which I think is the book’s most engaging long lyric:          

                           

If as it was is as it should be,
what ashy leftover to leave as immutable script on this storied age,
by what eternizing rubble do we make handy our brief holiday tale?

 

It is made clear that memory is a re-visitation of familiar places, and what we have in “Itinerary” are catalogues of real historical places. These are the Malinta Tunnel and Fort Santiago enriching the pages of Philippine history books. The prescient point however is that David lends multiplicity of voices to her fluid and engaging subjects even before historical moments become statistics. One characteristic of this poetic contouring is the use of personal pronouns from Day One, through the narrating spatio-temporal self, to Day Seven. In short, David uses an equalizer to articulate her critical position of rethinking the past as a metaphor echoing the imperfect or what appears to be artistic, as it were, in a narrative problematizing what I call the eventness of memory sites.      

David therefore confronts different speakers in order to depict the kind of reality or memory construct we share with one another. She uses the differing “I”, “you”, “we” and “he/she” to infuse a perspective, an interconnectedness, and certainly a remembrance not without spatial imagination. There is as well a locus of sensibility in David’s use of pronouns following the first person, in which case, writes National Artist Edith Tiempo on her poetic practice, “the ‘I’ is the practical part in contact with the everyday world, the ‘you’ is the dreamer part of the personality, and the ‘we’ the social conscience that sees the integration of the persona with the universal community.” 

Moreover, the function of David’s pronouns seemingly parallels the complete erasure of war, hence these grammatical beings—WWII soldiers, truant visitors, black primitive birds—need to be ‘identified’ in order to be alluded to by context-minded artists. Lastly, the form or poetic structure problematizes the apparent dislocation of the speaker recapitulating the language of space after space—the condition of in-betweenness—where, in the context of reconciling personal narratives (inside) and the conventional historicity of extreme events (outside), this becomes the site of memory that actualizes a confrontation between the speaker being narrated and his narration of his material. History here is within the purview of the hovering yet confrontational “I”. Such displacement of the speaker in “Itinerary” creates tension or deliberate disclaiming of the space because if “there exists a border-line surface between such an inside and outside, this surface is painful on both sides,” and such claim would prove otherwise the hypothesis of Gaston Bachelard. So the pressure lies primarily in the subjective/spatial positioning of the speaker while narrating the historical material through his spectral presences and, of course, how his narration functions as whether to inspire his art or recount history as a project channeling prosthetic memory. We see after all a conscious form of history as having “a cruel prepositional gaze: it fixes you. It mounts you.”

The repetition of the schizoid ‘you’ in the “Repository” and “Soliloquy” series and the informed utterances of David’s Itinerary poems have demonstrated enough poetic dexterity and mastery of language, remarkable for their introspection that is reminiscent of familiar poetic voices: Anne Waldman, Linda Gregerson, or the Beat ‘outriders’ of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. To wit, the technique of repetition builds up an idea that “meaning,” as Lyn Hejinian noted, “is set in motion, emended and extended.” You Are Here therefore is everything, refracted and remade by immortalizing its own mortal (poetic) struggle. Its often ambidextrous lyricism culminates on “a membrane of sightless intelligence.” 

 

*****

 

Lawdenmarc Decamora is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize-nominated writer with work published in 21 countries around the world. Earning an honourable mention on the 2018 special Love issue of Columbia Journal, Lawdenmarc holds an MFA in Creative Writing and is now an MA Literary and Cultural Studies candidate at the Ateneo de Manila University. He is the new Assistant Editor of the century-old UNITAS Journal while serving as a faculty researcher at the University of Santos Tomas. His full-length poetry book is set to come out in 2021 from Atmosphere Press. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in North Dakota QuarterlyThe Seattle ReviewThe CommonKyoto Review of Southeast AsiaHumanities DilimanCordite Poetry ReviewIlanot ReviewPedestal MagazineYellow Medicine Review, AAWW’s The MarginsCHAQuarterly Literary Review Singapore, among other numerous places. He divides his time between Manila and Pampanga.

 

 

Thursday, April 15, 2021

OBJECT PERMANENCE by NICA BENGZON

 EILEEN TABIOS Engages

OBJECT PERMANENCE by Nica Bengzon

(Gaudy Boy/Singapore Unbound, New York, 2021)

BOOK LINK

N.B.: This "review" is written concurrent with a reading through the book from first to last page.


I'm a fan of finding poetry in technical language. It's part of my poetics belief that one need not make things up to create poems--the poet simply needs to be lucid enough to see the poetry that already exists around us. So I was pleasantly surprised that this seems to be the, or one, path for Nica Bengzon's debut poetry collection, OBJECT PERMANENCE

The opening poem, "In the Event of a Catastrophe," begins to read like standard instructions given to medical staff as they deal with emergencies, e.g. the first page:

But when the reader gets to Page 5 to read about what happens next after victims have been sorted among those not needing immediate assistance to those needing help right away, the reader is faced with


Surely no medical instruction actually notes:

Who do you go to first?

The loudest?

The bloodiest?

The youngest?

Also, the next page instructs, "Triage with the head, not the heart." Is this ... possible?

And when the reader gets to Page 10 and sees again (the second time at this point) the phrase "walking wounded" as a standard for assessing the patient, this reader is momentarily yanked out from the book's psychological space to pause and consider humanity in general, that is, that so many of us not having medical issues are nonetheless "walking wounded." To live is, among other things, to hurt. I could go on philosophizing but, more to the point of conducting a review, let me just note the deftness with which Bengzon inserts terminology that seems applicable to particular (medical) instances but may have larger reach; the effect enhances the intimacy of reading and, surely, that is one way to enhance the poetry experience. (I should note that I don't know if "walking wounded" is true medical terminology but even if not the phrase is presented as such.)

~

Terminology and technical terms have an understated effect, relative to language aspiring to the poetic. This collection is also effective for its trust in the reader. The poet trusts that readers can discern on their own the poetic resonance of a seemingly bald-faced statement like:

Patients tagged BLACK can be covered, if necessary, and left in place.

This clinical, if you will, linguistic approach also serves to magnify the effect when the poet does choose to discernibly insert a more lyrical and personal presence: 

Ask any doctor worth their salt for the story of how it is to watch someone die. // Have them describe to you the cutting of the power line somewhere inside the skull, the cessation of electric currents in the region. The veil being drawn over the statue. Water draining away.


At this point, I have written-responded per the above as I finished reading the first poem, "In the Event of a Catastrophe," which is to say the book opens brilliantly. The first poem is a stellar threshold for the reader to engage on the way to the rest of the poems. And the rest live up to the first poem's implications, specifically, where health becomes the root from which to meditate on both the body and spirit. I am particularly taken by "The Law of Gravity" that makes me (among other things) react with an affirming "Oh yes!" at the idea of language's hold as gravity. I excerpt the first--and amazing--stanza here:


I said the parenthetical "among other things" above because the poem also ends unexpectedly with a swerve I admire even as it cuts me--the presented rationale for letting "the child fall" (for more, I encourage you to read the poem, this book, yourself).

As I continue reading through the collection, I also notice something admirable (and that other poets might consider as my memory interrupts my reading. But let me go on...). I notice that Bengzon pushes her poems--i.e., no easy-to-achieve or predictable endings for her poems. An example is "The Law of Gravity," which I mention because the poem could have ended with the first stanza that I excerpt above. Instead, the poem continues on for two more stanzas. A similar thing happens in other poems like "The Law of Conservation" which could have ended appropriately with its 5th stanza that ends, "When we die, our bodies / become the grass, and the antelope eats the grass." That's a good ending but the poem continues on to end equally effectively with "Why split hairs about form?" In extending the length of the poems, the poet increases the risk of unnecessary words that may not be as strong as the poems' beginnings, but Bengzon only widens the narrative expanse to make more fulsome poems.

[Insert 10-minute pause as I try but fail 

to remember which poet once called short 

poems the refuge of those who can't write

 long ones. Anyway...]

Such ability to write effective longer, then long poems, are set to good use in several poems. Later in the collection, we remain interested as we (continue to) read through "A Miracle Story," "All Things Bright and Beautiful" and "Today We Are Canceling the Apocalypse." A poem like "Scattering" easily shows how the poem's length is earned: "Scattering" is a delicate gem; it ever teeters on fraughtness without giving in to it because of a simmering sweetness among its lines (as delineated by sibling love).

Last but not least, OBJECT PERMANENCE is a book clearly written not just by a writer but by a reader. On reads or senses medical or scientific treatises but also books on religion and by spiritual writers (some of whom are named like Richard Siken). Bengzon takes it all into a stew spiced by both head and heart and gives back generously with poems that turn reading into a hugely satisfactory experience. This reader is grateful--this book is recommended.


*****


Eileen R. Tabios has released over 60 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in 10 countries and cyberspace. In Spring 2021, she released her first novel DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times. Her 2020 books include a short story collection, PAGPAG: The Dictator’s Aftermath in the Diaspora; a poetry collection, The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku: Selected Tercets 1996-2019; and her third bilingual edition (English/Thai), INCULPATORY EVIDENCE: Covid-19 Poems. Her body of work includes invention of the hay(na)ku, a 21st century diasporic poetic form, and the MDR Poetry Generator that can create poems totaling theoretical infinity. Translated into 11 languages, she also has edited, co-edited or conceptualized 15 anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays. Her writing and editing works have received recognition through awards, grants and residencies. More information is at http://eileenrtabios.com