Eileen R. Tabios

Murder death resurrection

Another way for poetry

In 2013, I was weary of everything I’d written. So I decided to murder my poems — specifically twenty-seven poetry collections published up to that point — in an attempt to find another way for creating poems. For this attempt, I also wanted to deepen my interrogation (and disruption) of English which had facilitated twentieth-century US colonialism in my birthland, the Philippines.

June 20, 2019

Cityscapes in verse

Brianne Alphonso

Capsule reviews

Jacket2’s summer intern, Brianne Alphonso, reviews three poetry titles that deal in cityscapes: On a Clear Day by Jasmine Dreame Wagner, Manhattan an Archaeology by Eileen R. Tabios, and Blue by Wesley St. Jo and Remé Grefalda. Of On a Clear Day, she notes in part: “Wagner’s book — a medley of prose, poems, and essays — tells a story of urban noise in an age where ‘visibility, consistency, solvency, become moral imperatives.’ From the tapping of fingers on iPhone screens to the radio waves buzzing in our ears, the very air we breathe is loud.”

Recently in Jacket2

Topsy-Turvy

Charles Bernstein

Please buy the book directly from the publisher, University of Chicago Press, or a local bookstore, including Bridge Street Books, SemCoop, Talking Leaves, Indiebound, McNally-Jackson, and Bookshop.Org.

176 pages, paper and ebook. Audiobook is from Chicago and Amazon/Aubible.

Teaching Is Listening

on teaching poetry for Guanzhou University

Charles Bernstein

I made this short video for a conference on teaching English language poetry, sponsored by Guangzhou University, July 2, 2022. Li Zhimin has created an online course, partly based on Al Filreis's ModPo. This meeting is an extension of that course. In the video, I mention the Poem Profiler and Wreading Experiments; for more on this topic, see Attack of the Difficult Poems.

Lyric shard as grief's material

A review of Diana Khoi Nguyen's 'Ghost Of'

Kelly Hoffer

Part archive, part elegy, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut collection of poetry, Ghost Of, presents the haunting portrait of a grieving family set against a backdrop of intergenerational trauma. Written four years after the poet’s brother took his own life, Nguyen’s poems register this loss as it is refracted through the story of her parents’ immigration to the US as refugees in the wake of the Vietnam War.