LOVE NOTES TO FILIPINO AUTHORS--FOR ISSUE 16

This Feature presents readers sharing some love about the talent of Filipino writers and artists. We would welcome your participation. This section is for readers. You don't have to write "like a professional," "like a critic," "like an intellectual," "like a well-rounded reader," etc. Just write honestly about how you were moved. Live writers and artists (let alone the dead) don't get to hear enough from others who engage with their works (some may not even know all who comprise their audience). To know someone read their stories and poems or appreciated their artistry is to receive a gift. Just share from your heart. It will be more than enough. DEADLINE: April 15, 2024 for Issue #17. Duplications of authors/artists and more than one testimonial are fine.

Mangozine's Issue #16 Presents

Leny Strobel on Eileen R. Tabios and M. Evelina Galang

Dani Magsumbol on Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio
Hilton Obenzinger on Beverly Parayno
Eileen Tabios on Marlon Hacla
Josie Fernandez on Beverly Parayno
Vicente Rafael on Grace Talusan
Eileen Tabios on Nick Carbo
Rashaan Alexis Meneses on Beverly Parayno
Karyn Wergland on Beverly Parayno
Beau Beausoleil on Eileen R. Tabios

Leny Strobel on Eileen R. Tabios and M. Evelina Galang

Dear Eileen,

Of all the books you've published, this one is the hardest for me to respond to. I take a look at the title and I start tearing up. Is it the - I Become War - in the title that pierces my heart? Is it the portrait of Kerima and the lines "We are a people as hardy as you and, soon/our Motherland shall be watered by other/sources other than the veins of sacrificed poets?" Or is it the tears flowing when I read the Ukraine poems? Is it about the "Prayers in the Evacuation Garden"?  Or  is it the permission I give myself this moment to let this river flow so early in the morning. I want to hug these poems and poetics. I, too, want to say to the our people that: because i love you, i became war.  

 

I am reminded now of the comfort women that Evelina Galang writes about. When she was in Manila doing research for her book the Filipina American students who were with her could barely listen to the stories the comfort women told without breaking down and the old women said "you must let these stories enter your body. it is only when these stories enter your body that the wars will end. stories are alive." And so it is with your poems.

May our poems and our stories enter our bodies. 

 

With grief and love,

Leny

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Dani Magsumbol on Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio

Reuniting With Strangers: A Novel by Jennilee Austria-Bonifaco

I started reading this book on the train, on my commute to campus, and & I finished it that same day on my commute home. The TTC was a silent witness to the overwhelming feeling of being seen. Grief for the emotional upheavals that couldn’t be shared in language, verbal or physical. Joy for families that made it back together after decades of separation. Relief for the characters who met each other with loving generosity and the recognition that this was something new, making room for things which were not expected. And most of all, I was steeped in that sense of liminality that many of us in the Filipino diaspora are intimately familiar with: which way is “here,” and which way is “there”? I lost myself in the novel & came up for air every few stops or so, half-emerging from my dazed state to make sure I hadn’t gone past where I was supposed to get off. I cried at Wilson Station when Lolo Bayani and Monolith met at the bahay-na-bato, cried again at St. Patrick station later that day when Lolo Bayani sang for Monolith, & when Jermayne and Monolith met in Toronto. It felt apt to be reading about the experiences of migration on the train; I kept thinking about how home is always a place we leave behind, and also a place we are building in the present. Migrants always seem to be homeward bound. 

From the first page where Jennilee asks, “Why do we call it ‘the motherland’ when it isn’t where our mothers are,” this book felt like a song I knew the chorus to. Even the places I’ve not been to, like Sarnia and Iqaluit, or experiences I never had, like Jermayne’s conversation with their father — it all felt like I knew the characters. I have met them fleetingly in these pages, but I will be carrying them with me in my heart for a long time. As a daughter who experienced echoes of some of the things reflected in the book, I am in awe at how Jennilee wrote us into these pages with such gentleness & truth. What a tender exploration of what it means to be Filipino-Canadian. What gorgeous stories about us, by us. 

Maraming salamat for such a gift, Jennilee. So much love for you! 

First presented on Dani Magsumbol's website.

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Hilton Obenzinger on Beverly Parayno

Yes. Wildflowers is a collection of gems, stories of women experiencing different aspects of Filipino and Filipino American culture, including a brilliant story of a maid thrown out onto the street who literally has nothing, a professional lost in a relationship with a crass professional from Scotland, racial anxieties as a student in Ireland, deep folk practices with an albularyo, sharing families, and more. I could visualize each story as a film -- and I hope someone takes out an option on the book.

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Eileen Tabios on Marlon Hacla

The prose poem was my First Love among poetry forms and I was delighted to read the stellar examples in Marlon Hacla's GLOSSOLALIA (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023), translated into English by Kristine Ong Muslim. These poems speak well on their own behalf. They’re notable for their energetic ineffability. I appreciated all the poems but relished the longer ones—e.g. “Howl” and “Halfway Through Eternity”—because scale facilitated the poet’s mental travels through what are interesting and interestingly fluctuating landscapes. Nor can the poet seem to leave behind the lyric, but this was only beneficial. Recommended.

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Josie Fernandez on Beverly Parayno

Almost every single one of these stories [in Wildflowers] made me cry in a good way; illuminated an insight that I have had but have never read anyone else articulate; made me remember why I love reading … It was so heartening to read these stories about the Filipina experience in particular, what with our intersectionality within East-West, colonialism, color politics … these stories were beautiful, powerful and poignant. I found myself dog-earing a page in pretty much every story, struck as I was by incisive observations and minor asides that touched some deep part of me …

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Vicente Rafael on Grace Talusan

I'm coming to this book rather late, but as they say, better late than never. Grace Talusan's memoir, The Body Papers, is powerful and compelling. She dives into some of the most intimate details of her life-- her history of being sexually abused by her grandfather, her cancer treatments, her volatile relationship with her father as they immigrated to New England, her vexed relationship with white boyfriends. She also has some of the most interesting accounts of living in Manila as a Fulbright scholar, feeling at home and not at home (her account of crossing the street is particularly instructive). Beautifully written, highly recommended.

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Eileen Tabios on Nick Carbo

 

I cried a little while reading Nick Carbo's most recent book, EPITHALAMION. It'd been a while since I blurbed its manuscript and editing changes can happen so I was eager to see the printed version. Well, it's better than I remembered. Of course, I knew most of the individual poems since I've read all of Nick's prior books. But the poems were organized this time in a way that presents a different and fresh context—a context that emphasizes how excellent the poems are individually. Such can be the strength as well as advantage of a "Selected Poems" project, which also is this book. What I show below are the book’s first and last pages of the collection—I think you can glean the passion, power, and love in these poems just from these excerpts. 

First Page

Last Page

I'm also grateful to the publisher Milflores for a wonderful production that included allowing several of Nick's visual poems to be presented in their original colors. Just lovely... even though the 2 pages for "Saussure's Remedy" made me cry again. My tears are explained by the caption on the two-page image below, which cites how those Vispo sculptures no longer exist as they were damaged by the Glass Fire  wildfires that took down my home and its contents. When I say *poetry can evaporate*, this wasn't what I mean, especially because Nick Carbo’s poems will stay with you, alive in your heart.

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Rashaan Alexis Meneses on Beverly Pararon

Parayno’s prose [in Wildflowers] reveals an internal rhythm with clarity and conciseness of language. As readers move from one story to the next, the themes of estrangement, of displacement, of loneliness, belonging, and community, refract, reflect, and coalesce to a prismatic understanding of what it means to be a woman in the world today. 

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Karyn Wergland on Beverly Parayno

[Wildflowers] is beautiful, sharp and tough, the kind of book that opens the door between worlds and throws you a lifeline. You could say it's about poverty, abuse, immigration, racism, and art, but that doesn’t really sum it up, so let me say that if you've ever been lonely, if you've ever been abused, if you've ever been stuck in the wrong relationship, if the pressures on your family have ever been too much, buy this book. It gave me such a pang. (And a sharp intake of breath. And heart tingles.)” 

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Beau Beausoleil on Eileen R. Tabios

via letters on two books

Re. BECAUSE I LOVE YOU, I BECOME WAR

Dear Eileen,

A real pleasure to hear you [during Dunes Literary Festival] read some of the work from your new and well traveled poetry book. Your poetry, as it moves on the page and in your thinking, is challenging, intriguing, inspiring, and finely written.

I was also struck by some of your comments on your relationship with your colonialist writing tongue. It reminded me of some comments that Paul Celan made in response to a question about why he continued to write in German after the Holocaust. I also liked what you said about writing in a form that you don't like because you don't like it. And again when you commented on ending among the language poets because you wanted to disrupt the language that you were fluent in for colonial reasons. I love that kind of reasoning, it makes perfect sense to me.

I remember reading an interview with Miles Davis wherein he was asked why he doesn't play ballads anymore, and his reply was that he doesn't play them because he loves to play them.

All best,
Beau

Re. The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku: Selected Tercets 1996-2019

Dear Eileen,

First, of course, is the kinship that we share in seeing the left hand margin as home, and the desire to return to it as the poem moves down the page. I love the way you get out of the way of your own words in even your most contemplative poems. I love that your eye is passionate and your words sometimes sly in the way you strip thought down and leave the reader with a new possible path of understanding. And yes, you are fearless and wounded and that opens up much common ground with any reader.

I've been picking your book up each morning and concentrating on three new poems and after reading them twice, trying to feel where they have come to rest on my bones. This morning the three were: “Maganda Begins,” “After A Departure,” and the series starting with “Infinity's Fragment.” I love these three that I mention because they are not afraid to leave me (the reader) behind in the breath of words that you use to create these moments. I like it when a poet has that much confidence in their own poem, in the strength of their own voice. 

I was thinking about your work and the phrase "fugue state" came to mind: "A dissociative fugue is a temporary state where a person has memory loss (amnesia) and ends up in an unexpected place." It's that "unexpected place" that applies to where your poems often carry me and of course your fugue state is not a memory loss but an actual acquisition of the memory of things and places, most especially the memory of words.

Thank you again for the book and it would be an honor to send you one of my own.

In Solidarity,
Beau

One of the poems mentioned by Beau: