ACH, YE PURPLE PATCHES OF LIT CRIT!

I was pleased by this review in The Feminist Review by Vita Foster of moi's Dredging For Atlantis. Pleased, not because it's a ravingly positive review (it's not) but because of this paragraph (click on it for whole review):

Most of the poems are short and in many cases did not grab my attention right away. Yet, many contained a startling turn of phrase that invited deeper contemplation, an effect I crave and the reason why I read poetry. Others just made me wonder what Tabios was smoking.

Someone once paid me the highest compliment possible (though I don't know if he knew he was paying a compliment) when he said about some of my poems (in ENGLISH): "I don't understand your poems but I like them."

Love it.

As for what I smoke? If you must know: ye olde Cuban cigar, the tip dipped first in the Chatelaine's Chalice which, in this instance, would probably bear the 1945 Taylor's Fladgate!

WANNA KNOW A SECRET?

According to the Feminist Review, I am "offering another possibility beyond narrative and the lyric in poetry."

Well, wooot!

To wit, the Feminist Review has reviewed (to my pleased surprise!) The Secret Lives of Punctuations, Vol. I (xPress(ed). You can click HERE for the entire review which I excerpt here for your -- okay, maybe just my (heh) -- reading pleasure (and I'm punchy pleased they highlighted Jukka here!):

Some of the results are unexpected analogies, metaphors, riddles and homonyms, while others are elaborate found quatrains taken from the poet Jukka-Pekka Kervinen’s text cornucopia. While Kervinen’s text is generated by a computer’s statistical distribution from John Locke’s “The Essay of Toleration” and Antonio Gramsci’s Letters from Prison, Tabios wants the words to express their inherent sound and spirit. In a way, The Secret Lives of Punctuations represents the organic potential of a found poem removed by two degrees from its original texts.

This book becomes more intriguing when Tabios offers her insights on this process. In addition to her interaction with Kervinen’s text, she refers to Spirits in Stone: Zimbabwe Shona Sculpture. The sculptors’ philosophy adheres to the practice of carving the spirit of what is already present in the wood, instead of trying to force what one may desire upon the wood being carved. So, these poems could also be seen as another illustration of the conflict between nature and the constraints of civilization, which her postcard art in the book intimates the impropriety of punctuations having secret trysts in a hotel.