EILEEN TABIOS Engages
Where the Warehouse Things Are by Tony Robles
(Redhawk Publications, 2024)
I loved this book’s concept as soon as I heard about it: Where the Warehouse Things Are by Tony Robles. From his experience of working in a warehouse (the Care Solutions Mobility Center in Hendersonville, North Carolina), Robles created poems from warehouse objects and matters that spin out beyond the warehouse doors to herald the vastness of the universe. His book reminds me of that perpetual controversy over whether objects can be creatures. I, for one, believe an object becomes a creature when that object becomes a source of inspiration—such is, I believe, what happens in Robles’ poetry collection.
A perfect example is “Cardboard Poem Written on a Warehouse Wall” (you can see entire poem HERE) where the poem’s “I” is instructed to assemble what turns out to be a recliner-chair from the innards of “a big cardboard box that had been put together by cardboard hands and my hands / were the same color as the cardboard…”
The above quoted lines begin the poem and one can see as efficiently as the third line how the poem’s world has already spun out from cardboard to the narrative of color and introduction of the person whose hands are the same color. That personal introduction is what would allow the poet to evoke both a grandfather and a wise suggestion on hiding… on its way to evoking a worker in a fish market in Japan to a mother cutting a birthday cake to a movie director to its ending of “a thousand little poems, / a thousand little dreams that / a box cannot hold.” The poem’s journey is simply marvelous!
It's that poetic leap that makes the poems fly with lines like:
Boxes stacked
like empires under the
weight of a fluorescent stare
—from “Warehouse”
Or
The mattresses at the warehouse
sit stacked like slices of
Texas toast
—from “Sewing”
Objects become a means of deepening humanity, from one’s inescapable history (see the above excerpt on boxes again) to identity, as in:
Another box with no label sits
alone on a nearby shelf
I open it
Inside are arms, legs, a torso,
a face that looks much like mine
I take each part from the box
and try to piece it all together
into something that looks like:
courage
heart
fortitude
—from “Warehouse Part II”
In the poem “Fork Lift,” a massive forklift—daring one to “take a stab at it”—becomes a metaphor for a father, a source of strength for the speaker. Other examples of significances birthed by “warehouse things” abound throughout the book—“somewhere a wheel chair / is being put together while a / world tilts on its axis trying to / find its bearings” (Assembling a Wheelchair”) or “the dust mop tells me / that we are all going back / and forth and eventually back / to the dust from where we come” (“Ask the Dust Mop”).
It's no wonder then that the poet (in his Introduction) can share what he ultimately discovers in the warehouse:
“I come upon a box, a box that has been beyond my reach. I reach upward and finally pull it off the shelf. With my box cutter, I open it. It is filled with poems.”
Readers can only be grateful Robles discovered “what was in the warehouse all along.” For “it is [his] gift to you”—a testament to his qualities of observation and thoughtful meditations. For attentive readers, to read this book is to feel blessed.
*****
Eileen Tabios has released books of poetry, fiction, essays, art and experimental prose from publishers around the world. Recent releases include the novel The Balikbayan Artist; an art monograph Drawing Six Directions; a poetry collection Because I Love You, I Become War; an autobiography, The Inventor; and a flash fiction collection collaboration with harry k stammer, Getting To One. Other books include a first novel DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times (2021) which was translated by Danton Remoto into Filipino as KalapatingLeon for a 2024 release from UST Publishing (University of Santo Tomas). More information is at https://eileenrtabios.com
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