Amazon review by Grady Harp. You can click HERE for entire review, but here's an excerpt:
Tabios is not only a poet, she is also an inventor of variations in style and communication. She invented Hay(na)ku, a poem form she uses in this collection, but at the same time that she unveils all manner of forms of writing her thoughts, her main driver is 'striving for the glint slipping from a dream.'
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Jacket Magazine reviews NOTA BENE EISWEIN! You can click HERE for entire review, but here's an excerpt:
In the poem “Teatro Olimpia,” Tabios creates a political atmosphere exemplified by a lone flamenco dancer performing for soldiers she despises. The tension arises when the dancer’s boss orders her to lift her dress for the amusement of the soldiers watching her dance. While she dances, the dancer appears to escape from her plight through her reveries. Tabios uses graphic details to illustrate the forcefulness of the dancer’s steps:
shoe tips bearing
six extra
nails
drumming into a
floor she
imagined
as the naked
chests of
soldiers
beneath her.
The ingredient of violence that Tabios interjects into the poem through this imagery is a bit shocking. One wonders if the vengeance the dancer exacts through her imaginings is too severe. After all, the stares of soldiers seem to do little in the way of real harm to the dancer. But then again, the text implies that the dancer’s fantasies are the only viable vehicle through which she can rid herself of her psychic pain, her dread of the soldiers.
Eileen Tabios’s book Nota Bene Eiswein challenges the reader to scrutinize her text meticulously. One must examine the text over and over again until its words make plain to the reader Tabios’s vision of the world.
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New Mystics (July 23, 2009) reviews NOTA BENE EISWEIN. You can click HERE for entire review. But here's an excerpt:
In reading and reviewing several of Eileen Tabios’ collections, I have often been struck by her ability to take large themes and subjects, such as Diaspora and flamenco, and bring them around to her own vision and mission as a poet and artist. In “The Singer” she writes,
the worst thing
one can
say
about someone in
flamenco? No
me
dice nada. He
didn’t say
anything
to me… (pg. 68)
On the facing page, directly opposite, she writes,
…Do
you know
what
would be the
worst thing
said
about my poetry?
I created
nothing
that moved you.
