Book picks similar to
Real Karaoke People by Ed Bok Lee
poetry
asian-american
boyperson
apa-lit
Coal Mountain Elementary
Mark Nowak - 2009
The author of Revenants and Shut Up Shut Down, he is also a frequent contributor to the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog.
Next Life
Rae Armantrout - 2007
Attempting to imagine the unimaginable and see the unseen, Armantrout evokes a "next life" beyond the current, and too often degraded, one. From the new physics to mortality, Armantrout engages with the half-seen and the half-believed. These poems step into the dance of consciousness and its perennial ghost partner--"to make the world up/of provisional pairs." At a time when our world is being progressively despoiled, Armantrout has emerged as one of our most important and articulate authors. These poems push against the limit of knowledge, that event-horizon, and into the echoes and phantasms beyond, calling us to look toward the "next life" and find it where we can.
The Feel Trio
Fred Moten - 2014
African American Studies. Music. California Interest. THE FEEL TRIO is Cecil Taylor, Tony Oxley and William Parker. Or is it that THE FEEL TRIO are Cecil Taylor, Tony Oxley and William Parker? See, that's the amazing problem and chance, right there! In the wake and air and light of THE FEEL TRIO, what it bears and what propels them, which is everything in particular, THE FEEL TRIO tries to put some things together. Alabama runs through those things like nobody's business. I kept trying to visit the uncounted space James Brown forms around the one. To celebrate the varieties of black devotion. But coalition can't be too easy; it's in our nature not to come naturally lyrically, beautifully violently. The organizing principles, in our extramusical tailor's retrofit of fitting, sharp as a tack from the tone worlds of east by southeast of Sheffield, the Bronx's compassionate project/s and fly, flaired, flared Corona: listen to everything, relax the shape, approach with love, be worthy of a lovely t!
Ocean of Words
Ha Jin - 1996
The time is the early 1970s when the two giants were poised on the brink of war. And the characters in this thrilling collection of stories are Chinese soldiers who must constantly scrutinize the enemy even as they themselves are watched for signs of the fatal disease of bourgeois liberalism.In Ocean of Words, the Chinese writer Ha Jin explores the predicament of these simple, barely literate men with breathtaking concision and humanity. From amorous telegraphers to a pugnacious militiaman, from an inscrutable Russian prisoner to an effeminate but enthusiastic recruit, Ha Jin's characters possess a depth and liveliness that suggest Isaac Babel's Cossacks and Tim O'Brien's GIs. Ocean of Words is a triumphant volume, poignant, hilarious, and harrowing."A compelling collection of stories, powerful in their unity of theme and rich in their diversity of styles."--New York Times Book Review"Extraordinary...[These stories are shot through with wit and offer glimpses of human motivation that defy retelling...Read them all."--Boston Globe"An exceptional new talent, capable of wringing rich surprises out of austere materials."--Portland Oregonian
From Rufio to Zuko
Dante Basco - 2019
Basco ruminates on the formative power of his Filipino-American heritage, his family, the dynamics that evolved throughout his career, and his experiences behind playing a couple of America's most popular characters.
Vice: New and Selected Poems
Ai - 1999
Employing her trademark ferocity, these new dramatic monologues continue to mine this award-winning poet's "often brilliant" (Chicago Tribune) vision.
Rabbit
Sophie Robinson - 2018
These poems take the reader on surprising journeys of healing, hard-won amid personal and social vicissitudes – including triumph over addiction, and alcoholism – and open spaces in which to share in emotional, quasi-spiritual transcendence despite. Who could ask for more? Rabbit was chosen for the PBS Wild Card Choice for Winter, 2018.
WITCHDOCTORPOET
Bola Juju - 2018
This book explores topics such as love, spirituality, womanhood, suicide, addiction, ancestral trauma and the unwavering power of healing from the inside out. WITCHDOCTORPOET is an offering to those in need of a sensual and empowering stance on the realities and legacies of the African Diaspora.
The Complete Posthumous Poetry
César Vallejo - 1978
Eshleman and his present collaborator, Jose Rubia Barcia, have not only rendered these complex poems into brilliant and living English, but have also established a definitive Spanish test based on Vallejo's densely rewritten manuscripts. In recreating this modern master in English, they have also made a considerable addition to poetry in our language."
Not My White Savior: A Memoir in Poems
Julayne Lee - 2018
When she was an infant, she was adopted by a white Christian family in Minnesota, where she was sent to grow up.Not My White Savior is a memoir in poems, exploring what it is to be a transracial and inter-country adoptee, and what it means to grow up being constantly told how better your life is because you were rescued from your country of origin. Following Julayne Lee from Korea to Minnesota and finally to Los Angeles, Not My White Savior asks what does "better" mean? In which ways was the journey she went on better than what she would have otherwise experienced?Not My White Savior is angry, brilliant, unapologetic, and unforgiving. A vicious ride of a book that is sure to spark discussion and debate.
1000 Poems from the Manyōshū
Ōtomo no Yakamochi
The 1,000 poems (out of a total of more than 4,500) in this famous selection were chosen by a distinguished scholarly committee based on their poetic excellence, their role in revealing the Japanese national spirit and character, and their cultural and historical significance. The acclaimed translations artfully preserve the simplicity and direct quality of the originals, and encompass an enormous range of human emotions and experiences. Text is in English only
A Nail the Evening Hangs on
Monica Sok - 2020
Driven by myth-making and fables, the poems examine the inheritance of the genocide and the profound struggles of searing grief and PTSD. Though the landscape of Cambodia is always present, it is the liminal space, the in-betweenness of diaspora, in which younger generations must reconcile their history and create new rituals. A Nail the Evening Hangs On seeks to reclaim the Cambodian narrative with tenderness and an imagination that moves towards wholeness and possibility.
Hardly War
Don Mee Choi - 2016
Using artifacts from Choi's father, a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she combines memoir, image, and opera to explore her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring empire.Like fried potato chips—I believe so,utterly so—The hush-hush provingground was utterly proven as history—Hardly=History—I believe so, eerilyso—hush hush—Now watch thisperformance—Bull's-eye—An uncannyhuman understanding on target—Absolute=History—loaded withterrifying meaning—The Air Forcedoesn't say, hence Ugly=Narration— Don Mee Choi is the author of The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and translator of contemporary Korean women poets. She has received a Whiting Writers Award and the 2012 Lucien Stryk Translation Prize. Her translation of Kim Hyesoon's Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (Action Books, 2014) was a finalist for the 2015 PEN Poetry in Translation Award. She was born in Seoul and came to the United States via Hong Kong. She now lives in Seattle, Washington.
Inseminating the Elephant
Lucia Perillo - 2009
Whether recalling her former career as a naturalist experimenting on white rats or watching birds from her wheelchair, she draws the reader into unforgettable places rich in image and story. Lucia Perillo is the author of four books of poetry that have won the Norma Farber First Book Award, the Kate Tufts Prize, the Balcones Prize, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Her critically acclaimed memoir, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature, was published in 2007.
Blackacre: Poems
Monica Youn - 2016
Treacherously lush or alluringly bleak, these poems reframe their subjects as landscape, as legacy―a bereavement, an intimacy, a racial identity, a pubescence, a culpability, a diagnosis. With a surveyor’s keenest tools, Youn marks the boundaries of the given, what we have been allotted: acreage that has been ruthlessly fenced, previously tenanted, ploughed and harvested, enriched and depleted. In the title sequence, the poet gleans a second crop from the field of Milton’s great sonnet on his blindness: a lyric meditation on her barrenness, on her own desire―her own struggle―to conceive a child. What happens when the transformative imagination comes up against the limits of unalterable fact?