Hay(na)ku Exhibition at the San Francisco Public Library
By the Filipino American Center, Third Floor
100 Larkin Street
San Francisco, CA 94102
This is a reprise of the Hay(na)ku Exhibit Celebrating its 15th Year Anniversary; More information HERE.
Erotically charged and intellectual, entertaining, always surprising, this virtuoso novel seduces with its layers, its characters, and its wide-ranging reflections on art, poetry, history, politics, and desire. The story circles around Elena, orphaned as a child in (the fictional country of) Pacifica and sent to live in the United States, where, as a young woman, she repeatedly seeks out a stranger for domination/submission encounters. What secrets about her country and herself is she trying to uncover, and how are they linked to Ernst, her nonbinary lover? How does her story — and that of her father, her mother, her daughter and grandsons — reflect and change the history of her homeland? The novel is structured like indigenous myth, where past, present and future do not exist, and where everything is present at once and connected to each other: fairy tales, the struggle against a dictator, poetics, colonialism, motherhood, gender identity, sexual passion, romantic love, and even a recipe for adobo. Eileen R. Tabios uses her pen like Elena uses her whip, provoking tenderness through intense sensation as well as illumination through sensuality and a passionate, hungry mind.
Eileen Tabios @ Tenderloin Museum (Kelsey Street Press Reading)
(Click to enlarge)
