GIRAFFE BOOKS PRESS RELEASE
EXACTLY HERE, EXACTLY NOW by Nadine Sarreal, a short story collection
ECSTATIC MUTATIONS by Eileen Tabios, a collection of poems, fiction and
essays
Giraffe Books is proud to announce two new books which provide inspiring
testimonies to the perseverance required by artistry: EXACTLY HERE, EXACTLY
NOW by Nadine Sarreal and ECSTATIC MUTATIONS by Eileen Tabios. Both writers
took a hiatus of nearly two decades from the literary life to focus their
energies elsewhere. Yet their years of experience beyond the page now
provide fuel for their poems and stories, proving that everything in Life may
be relevant to the artist.
Nadine first committed to her roles as student, wife, mother, computer
programmer, volunteer worker, even handbell ringer, in the Philippines,
United States, Hong Kong and Singapore. Ultimately, however, Nadine Sarreal
found accommodation for the artist within her and returned to graduate school
for a degree in creative writing. More recently, Nadine has become a
recognized contemporary Filipino American writer. Her work has been
increasingly published in magazines and anthologies. She is one of 26
contemporary Filipino writers in the Philippines and the U.S. chosen by Bino
A. Realuyo to appear in The Literary Review's Special Supplement on Filipino
Writing (Spring 2000) which features an excerpt from Nadines
novel-in-progress, PUTSERO. Two of Nadines poems also appear in BABAYLAN:
An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina-American Women, edited by Nick Carbo
and Eileen Tabios.
Eileen spent her earlier career years in journalism, economics, stock
market analysis, project finance banking and even (begrudgingly, she says)
received an MBA in international business and economics along the way.
Undoubtedly, that she took a path so different from many of her peers has
facilitated her ability to break boundaries in her work as a poet, writer and
editor. Thus, scholar Leny Mendoza Strobel writes in her Introduction to
Eileens ECSTATIC MUTATIONS, "As a Filipino English-language poet, [Eileen]
says it was inevitable that she question how to express her-SELF through
language. When the results of her search are *abstract* works, the result
leaps over categories and boundaries of what has been labeled ethnic
literature (in the U. S.) through its reliance on subject matter.What
Eileen's poetry makes me consider is this: When the sorrow of our colonial
past is released and we come to know our Philippine history as the history of
the world, Eileen's poetry becomes an act of rounding up the fragments of our
narrative.if one is already decolonizedthen she can engage in other acts
of creation which neither forget, negate, narrateand that by simply being
herself as a poet, she gives back over and over again to the Filipino
collective effort towards self-recovery or discovery."
EXCERPTS and ADVANCE WORDS:
Nadine Sarreal:
Nadines EXACTLY HERE, EXACTLY NOW is a quiet gift of ten stories written
over a period spanning three decades. These are stories written from the
gentle self--the self that takes in life experiences and saves them up for
later telling. They transcend an 18-year hiatus from the literary life. A
seasoned perspective allows the author to write with compassion and
understanding about different kinds of people: mostly Filipino, and mostly
Filipinos who are no longer in the Philippines.
Excerpts from two stories in Exactly Here, Exactly Now:
"Ivory"
"No more endearing names now. He was a different person, grown into the
child they had never had. The tumor was boiling him down to this last salty
residual of intelligence. "Desire of my soul," she had crooned to him at the
radiologists lab last week. No joy registered in his eyes and she
experienced a dark, inexplicable rejection. This was surely the most painful
insult of all, that he no longer remembered their special belongingness, the
bridge between their hearts."
"Lakeside"
"They had meant to stay in America for five years, just enough time to save
money for a house back home. They would live simply once they returned and
they would both work at jobs they loved. So this was their plan. But after
the fifth year passed, they did not speak of it again. Houses had become
more and more expensive in their country. And somehow, they hadnt been
able to save much at all over their first five years. They had started with
nothing and had to buy every dish, towel and piece of furniture they owned.
There had been a run of bad cars, too, and they knew now about transmissions,
leaking radiators, and faulty fuel pumps. Then when the baby came, there was
no question but for the mother to quit her job and care for him until he was
ready for school. Neither of them said to the other, lets forget about our
plan to go home and just stay here. And neither of them said, lets save for
12 years instead of five. And then well go home. They said nothing about
staying in America or going back, and this silence hung between them
constantly so that when they talked about events in the future, they looked
away from each other for a moment, to recover from the weight of what they
werent saying."
Eileen Tabios:
Eileens ECSTATIC MUTATIONS collects a selection from her poetry, fiction and
essays, while concurrently transcending these same formal categories.
Here is an excerpt from "The Continuance of the Gaze," one of Eileens prose
poems:
"What is the common denominator of humanity?
Yesterday, in the park where trees had stripped into pale
limbs, I saw an old couple display affection as if they
had never lived through a single world war. I followed
the image of clasped hands into a dream whose texture,
like rice paper, was so delicate it was difficult to prevent
the edges of my vision from shredding. In that dream,
I was a child again, taking deep breaths that always
deposited into my lungs a sad knowledge: I will
manifest my fate of peeling through this lifetime's
layers by making decisions that will always require me
to adjust. Now, I have passed a certain threshold so
that a good day can be defined simply by eating a red
apple while walking amidst white snow. I miss New
Mexico whose villages I can never attend: where
adobe walls are warmed by lanterns of brown
paper bags surrounding fat candles aglow."
ADVANCE WORDS on ECSTATIC MUTATIONS include:
The multifaceted Eileen Tabioswho emerges a full blown member of the new
generation of poetswrites with a sure hand of an artisan whose writing
style ranges from the lyrical voice of the youngvulnerable and
accessibleto the philosophical certainty of the oldhard knocking, gritty
and diamond sharp. When her lyrics sing, they clutch at your throat with the
tenacity of a drowning child hoping for the helping hand to allow survival.
Her prose poems contain some of the philosophical truths that always startle
you by its honesty. Her poems give you the most compelling notion that
poetry is poetry when your nape hair stands on endand you say: "How true.
How true."
-- Carlos A. Angeles
Poet (A Bruise of Ashes: Collected Poems 1940-1992)
& Philippine Palanca Awardee
In Eileen Tabios' writings, one is seeking to be free, like brushstrokes on a
framed canvas where the desired portrait is the world around it. Tabios'
world is one without walls, without lines, without time; and it is luminously
manifested in her works, in her attempts to capture the moments of the ever
curious and the ever questioning. In her poetics, she unravels the unknown.
But isn't the gift of a writer her limitless imagination? In this collection,
Tabios' yearnings are as demanding as the words through which she expresses
them, as mysterious as our world full of life, imagined and real.
-- Bino A. Realuyo
Poet and Novelist (The Umbrella Country)
& Poetry Society of America Awardee
(Lucille Medgwick Memorial Prize)
For more information about EXACTLY HERE, EXACTLY NOW and ECSTATIC MUTATIONS,
contact Giraffe Books, #7 Visayas Avenue, Diliman, Quezon City, MM
Philippines: Tel/fax (632) 928-9269 email GiraffeBooks@aol.com
These books will also be available through the Philippine American Literary
House at www.palhbooks.com or tel/fax (310) 392-0541.
Alex Maskara is Pinoy
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