Kategoria BISAC: Poetry >> American - Asian American & Pacific Islander

Pui Ying Wong's An Emigrant's Winter offers fresh eyes on both Chinese and American landscapes. Being the stranger gives the poet-narrator a visionary lens to see paint "almost undone / by humidity and time," to identify with a gecko "playing dead / with its eyes open." The poet is an undercover observer, hiding out front like the gecko, hiding to survive. Boundary-crossing poet Pui Ying Wong is always lyrical, no matter where she lights. By contrast with the images from Hong Kong ("the neighbors, quiet / as an unstrung guitar.") Wong's America is charged with big stories and...

In the Hospital

My mother was in the hospital & everyone wanted to be my friend.
But I was busy making a list: good dog, bad citizen, short
skeleton, tall mocha. Typical...

Rooted in meditations on contemporary neuroscience, Brain Fever takes as its subject the mysteries of the human mind--the nature of dreams and memories, the possibly illusory nature of linear time, the complexity of conveying love to a child. In one poem, "A Bowl of Spaghetti," she cites a comparison that researchers draw between unraveling "the millions of miles of wires in the human] brain" and "untangling a bowl of spaghetti," and thus she untangles a memory of her own: "I have an old photo: Rei in her high chair intently / picking out each strand to mash in her mouth. // Was...

"Was it Jung who speculated that alcoholism might be an attempt at a material solution for a spiritual problem? Kaveh Akbar seems able to contain both--he's a demotic, as well as a spiritual, poet (the only type of either I trust). Each word in this little book might rise up from somewhere deep in the earth, but they turn into stars." - Nick Flynn

"In Islam prayer is not transactional, poetry is not divorced from the quotidian and portraiture is embraced only in the abstract. And yet here in Kaveh Akbar's book, entreaty is earnest, aimed at the human and particular more often than...

Feminist experimental poetry in the tradition of Audre Lorde and Theresa Kyung Cha from a prominent Filipina American poet.

The fifth collection from Oakland poet Barbara Jane Reyes, in the tradition of Audre Lorde and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Invocation to Daughters is a book of prayers, psalms, and odes for Filipina girls and women trying to survive and make sense of their own situations. Writing in an English inflected with Tagalog and Spanish, Reyes unleashes this colonized tongue against sexualized and racialized violence towards Pinay women. With its...

"With astringent understatement and wry economy, with nuance and intelligence and an enviable command of syntax and poetic line, Victoria Chang dissects the venerable practices of cultural piety and self-regard. She is a master of the thumbnail narrative. She can wield a dark eroticism. She is determined to tackle subject matter that is not readily subdued to the proportions of lyric. Her talent is conspicuous."--Linda Gregerson

"Chang's voice is equal parts searing, vulnerable, and terrified."--American Poets

In Barbie Chang, Victoria Chang explores racial...

"Over the last two decades Shaughnessy has stripped herself down to a voice that can sing plainly about disappointment and love in hard circumstances and the lost art of the mix tape."--The Paris Review

"Shaughnessy finds ever new ways to rend the heart in this biting and poignant anthropological study of girlhood and adolescence."--Publishers Weekly

Subversions of idiom and cliche punctuate Brenda Shaughnessy's fourth collection as she approaches middle age and revisits the memories, romances, and music of adolescence. So Much Synth is a brave and...