Asylum | Quan Barry | University of Pittsburgh Press (2001)

Recommended by Mia: “My holiday reading pick . . . it’s her first collection.  Her engagement with the voices and subjects of the Vietnam War is beautifully executed, and though the scope of her work is much broader, I was most riveted by her ‘war’ poems.”

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Behind My Eyes | Li-Young Lee | W.W. Norton & Company (2008)

Recommended by Iris: “This is Lee’s most recent collection — and it is stunning, as always.  Figurations of the Virgin Mary intertwine with moving landscapes, conversations between the poet and his wife, the transitory spaces of travel, a chance vision of the poet’s father; all hang in a delicate, almost sacred, lumen, suspended somewhere between heaven and earth.  Each poem breathes with an expansiveness and a grave tenderness that only Lee knows how to render. Behind My Eyes is sold with a CD of the poet reading some the poems in the book, and I highly recommend listening to this, as well.  I had the privilege of hearing Lee read from his drafts for this book a few years before it came out, and loved the way that the intonation of his voice seamed through the lines of each poem, threading them together in a low, sonorous hum.  It’s a beautiful listening experience, and adds a new and lovely textural dimension to his already melodious poetics.”

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Call Me Ishmael Tonight | Agha Shahid Ali | W.W. Norton & Company (2003)

Recommended by Supriya: “This collection of ghazals shows the versatile ways in which a poetic form can go beyond its history and language while staying true to its essence. Agha Shahid Ali demonstrates the intentionality with which he overcomes expectations and boundaries by using a traditional form that often evokes feelings of longing and melancholia but writing in a contemporary English that feels timeless. Although written entirely in form, the range and depth of this collection allows for a vast expanse of emotions and possibilities and is the perfect collection with which to curl up whatever your mood.”

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A Gesture Life | Chang-rae Lee | Penguin USA (2000)

Recommended by Ada: “Told from the point of view of Dr. Hata, a Japanese WWII veteran, this fictional memoir weaves between his experiences in a crumbling outpost of a Japanese imperial outpost in the last days of the war and his later life in gated, suburban America. The protagonist in Lee’s second novel is so reasonable it’s eerie, and though I think that we are meant to feel sorry for Dr. Hata and the stiffly respectable, appropriately understated life he has bound himself into, the distance that separates him from all the other characters in this book translates into distance from the reader. Not that the whole book left me cold: the scenes describing Dr. Hata’s encounters with Korean comfort women during the war are eye-opening, gripping, and an interesting perspective on the terrors of war.”

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We also highly recommend any of the titles that we’ve featured in our posts to date.  Some notables:

• The Heart’s Traffic (Ching-In Chen; Arktoi Press 2009)
  [as featured in Supriya Misra's review]
• Juan Luna’s Revolver (Luisa Iglora; UND Press 2008)
  [as featured in our interview with Luisa Igloria]
• Imago (Joseph Legaspi; CavanKerry Press 2007)
  [as featured in Ada Yee's interview with Joseph Legaspi]
• Look We Have Coming to Dover! (Daljit Nagra, Faber & Faber 2007)
  [as featured in Mrigaa Sethi's critique of the poem "Darling and Me!"]
• Half-Lit Houses (Tina Chang; Four Way Books 2004)
  [as featured in Stephen Sohn's post about Four Way]
• Sediment (Sandy Tseng; Four Way Books 2009)
  [as  featured in Stephen Sohn's post about Four Way]
• World Ball Notebook (Sesshu Foster; City Lights 2009)
  [as featured in this post, and in our post about the 2009 Asian American Literary Awards]
• Beasts for the Chase (Monica Ferrell; Sarabande Books 2008)
  [as featured in our post about the 2009 Asian American Literary Awards]
• An Aquarium (Jeffrey Yang; Graywolf  Press 2008)
  [as featured in our post about the 2009 Asian American Literary Awards]

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Please help support poets and the presses that publish them by considering picking up one or two of these titles as something to keep you occupied on that long plane ride, as a gift for a literature-loving friend, or simply as a winter afternoon treat.  What else is on your reading list for the holidays?  Comment and let us know!

Sesshu Foster's World Ball Notebook

We mentioned Sesshu Foster’s award-winning collection World Ball Notebook  back in November, when we did a post about the winners of the 2009 Asian American Literary Awards.

Well, it’s recently come to our attention that the magazine/blog Molossus, which bills itself as “an online broadside of world literature,” has posted a lovely conversation with Sesshu and is offering its readers a chance to win a free copy of World Ball Notebook in partnership with City Lights (winner to be announced this Wednesday, Dec. 16th). 

We loved what Sesshu had to say about using elements of indigenous heritage as “political and social iconography and ideology” rather than as “ethnography.”  Here’s an excerpt:

Our identity as Americans, as citizens of whatever it may be, is collectively bound up in on-going discourse and dialogue about our relations, our culture and history. Times change, and we can’t recycle categorical definitions of ethnic character that are forty years old any more than we can recycle racist assumptions about the self from the 19^th century. People do, of course, but writers are supposed to be hipper than that, more up to date.

To read more of the interview or to enter the giveaway, head on over to Molossus and check out their full post: “Atomik Aztek: A Conversation with Sesshu Foster + Book Giveaway!” [on Molossus]

2009 Asian American Literary Awards for Poetry: Winner & Finalists

In anticipation of their annual literary festival, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop has announced the winners of its 2009 Asian American Literary Awards.  In the poetry category, Sesshu Foster’s World Ball Notebook took top honors, while Monica Ferrell’s Beasts for the Chase and Jeffrey Yang’s An Aquarium were named as finalists.  The contest was judged by poet Cathy Park Hong, Stanford professor Stephen H. Sohn, and Williams College professor Dorothy Wang.

It’s always exciting to me when contemporary collections of poetry are given national attention in this way.  And as an MFA student working on my first book-length project, I’m especially encouraged by the selection of Ferrell’s and Yang’s collections as finalists, since they are both first books.  I had the pleasure of reading An Aquarium this past summer and now that these awards have been announced, I’ll definitely be adding World Ball Notebook and Beasts for the Chase to my reading list for the upcoming holidays.  Congratulations to all three poets, and kudos to the AAWW for continuing to perpetuate an image of Asian American literature as a living, evolving body of works rather than as a row of dusty volumes sitting quietly on some library shelf.

The 2009 Asian American Literary Awards will be presented this Saturday at the AAWW’s Page Turner festival.  Tickets start at $5. If you live near NYC or will be in NYC this weekend, we (the editors) highly recommend that you check out at least a few of the events on their exciting roster of panels and readings.