Sun Stigmata (Sculpture Poems)

Poetry. Art. Asian & Asian American Studies. SUN STIGMATA is a sculpture-inspired poetry collection from an award-winning poet known for her innovative approaches. The book includes poetics prose and an art essay.

"Eileen Tabios's poems twist like silk scarves caught in the wind, offering ardent calligraphies and sly subversions of the passions, so many ways of naming lucidity."—Andrew Joron

"In her new collection, SUN STIGMATA, Eileen Tabios has sculpted poems of light and shadow by using the blade of time to cut through stone. What is revealed as 'through a ripped hole in space,' is rendered 'as unforgiving as a sniper's eye...' With lapidary precision, Tabios links the personal to the eternal while deepening what is essentially human: '...did the Greeks attain / Purity? / Did I earn the moments / I made my mother cry...' Whether she is probing Rimbaud in the act of assigning colors to vowels, or recalling a lost generation of women in Manila 'hugging ashed corners of hopeless streets,' the voice is urgent and oracular, riding the radar between orders, implicit and explicit, in time and space. 'The most implacable border / can be the invisible / so that nothing is hidden from sight.' SUN STIGMATA reminds us of what art can do when it rises to the level of Mystery in which the initiates are transformed: the stigmata incarnated on these pages bleed spirit and awaken soul."—Paul Pines