Introducing Our 2021 Season: “Asian American Futures”

Call for submissions information graphic. LANTERN REVIEW. Call for Submissions: Asian American Futures. Regular Submissions (Asian American poets & visual artists): Jan 11–Feb 11. Youth Folio Submissions (Asian American poets & visual artists 14–24): Mar 11–Apr 11. lanternreview.submittable.com. (Black-and-white background photo of a wooden dock extending out over water into a foggy horizon; photo by Simone Mattielli on Unsplash.)
Save the date! Our first 2021 reading period opens soon.

It’s hard to believe that 2020 is nearing its end. (And what a year it’s been!) As we look ahead to 2021, we’re excited to announce that some changes are coming to LR’s magazine in the new year.

To begin with, we’re beyond delighted to announce that guest editor Eugenia Leigh will be joining our team for the duration of the 2021 season. Eugenia is an award-winning poet, the author of Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows, a seasoned teaching artist, and former poetry editor at both Kartika Review and Hyphen. She’s also a past LR contributor and has written in the past for our blog. Eugenia will be helping to co-curate the magazine, and you also might hear from her via our social media from time to time. We’re so excited to get to collaborate with her next year, and hope you’ll join us in giving her a warm welcome!

Additionally, in 2021, our magazine will center around the theme of “Asian American Futures.” For the first time, we’ll also be having two separate reading periods: from Jan 11–Feb 11, we’ll accept regular submissions, and from Mar 11–Apr 11, we’ll be inviting young Asian American writers aged 14–24 to submit their work to a special youth folio.

We’ll post again to remind you when the first submissions period goes live on the blog starting next month. But in the meantime, here is the official call. We hope you’ll read it through, save the date, and consider sending something our way!

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2021 Open Submissions (Jan 11–Feb 11): “Asian American Futures” 

As we enter 2021, many of us face uncertainty or grief, but the new year gives us a chance to dare to hope. And there is so much to hope for in the Asian American community, from the leadership of young Asian American activists on the protest lines to the rising profiles of Asian American artists, writers, and scholars on the national and global stages. This season, we’re hoping to publish poetry and visual art that embodies the spirit of a “love letter” to the future of Asian America. Maybe you have something to say to the young people in your life. Maybe you look at Kamala Harris and see a glimpse of your own childhood dreams or even the dreams you haven’t yet dreamed. Or maybe you’re thinking about the work we still need to do: about climate change, police brutality, anti-Asian racism, incarceration at the border, rising food insecurity, the model minority myth. Maybe you’ll channel the prophetic, the visionary; maybe you’ll see glimmers of hope in the ordinary. However you interpret this call, we look forward to hearing what you have to say. Please read our guidelines and tips carefully and send us your work by February 11th.

This call is open to all poets who identify as Asian American. We especially welcome submissions from poets who identify with marginalized groups within the Asian American community. If you are a young poet aged 14–24, we encourage you to send us your work during our Youth Folio submissions period (from March 11th–April 11th) instead.

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Youth Folio Open Submissions (Mar 11–Apr 11): “Asian American Futures” 

Young Asian American writers are the embodiment of our present and future. For the first time ever, we are actively seeking open submissions from you: Asian American poets and visual artists aged 14–24. We have grown increasingly in awe of the passion, conviction, and creativity of young people in our community, and we feel inspired to offer this space as our love letter to you. We hope to create a folio filled with your own “love letters” to the futures you will claim, embody, become. Send us your best work on any topic—past, present, or future. It can be about things political, or it can be an expression of where you are now, what makes you tick, your personal hopes and dreams. We can’t wait to hear from you. Please read our guidelines and tips carefully and send us your poems or visual art by April 11th. 

This call is for Asian American poets aged 14–24 only; if you are 25 or older, please submit during our open submissions period (from January 11th–February 11th) instead. We especially welcome submissions from poets who identify with marginalized groups within the Asian American community.

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We’re excited for the new things to come in 2021: for Eugenia’s partnership, for our new youth folio, and to read what you have to say about the future of Asian America! Please stay tuned for more updates in early January. In the meantime, we’re sending our warmest wishes to you and yours for a happy, healthy new year.

Peace and Light,
The Editors

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WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier

Layli Long Soldier, Whereas (Graywolf, 2017)

Please consider supporting an indie bookstore with your purchase.

As an Asian American–focused publication, Lantern Review stands for diversity within the literary world. In solidarity with other communities of color and in an effort to connect our readers with a wider range of voices, we recommend a different collection by a non-Asian-American-identified BIPOC poet in each blog post.

LR Issue 8.2 Is Here!

Cover Image: LANTERN REVIEW Issue 8.2, “Recoveries” (featuring a film still from Cindy Nguyen’s “Tokyo Glances”: blue-tinted photo of a waist-up, silhouetted figure in profile, wearing a white shirt and with short hair against an overcast sky. In the backdrop, a skyscraper with glass windows and another brick skyscraper to the side.)
Lantern Review Issue 8.2, “Recoveries”

It’s our pleasure today to announce that Issue 8.2, our second and final issue of the 2020 season, is live! Titled “Recoveries” after a line from antmen pimentel mendoza’s poem “Ode to the Moon, the Earth’s Only Satellite, with Years of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy,” this issue speaks to the notion of survival, enacting creative resistance in the face of trauma and inviting us to consider how the work of the artist may chart new paths through the processes of healing and regeneration.

When we first chose the work that appears in Issue 8.2, we had no idea how 2020 would play out, nor how prescient these pieces would feel in the midst of the present moment. In addition to mendoza’s poem, Issue 8.2 features striking cover art by Cindy Nguyen, as well as powerful poems by MICHAEL CHANG, Tiffany Hsieh, and Heather Nagami. As we put the issue together over the course of the last two months, we were struck anew by these singular pieces and how they seemed to speak with even greater urgency to our current reality, transgressing boundaries of time, form, and geography to insist upon being heard above the fray. Today, we’re excited to finally share them with you.

We hope you’ll enjoy Issue 8.2. And as always, we’d love to know what you think—leave us a comment below or let us know on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter: @LanternReview.

Wishing you peace and light always,
The LR editorial team

Click here to read Lantern Review Issue 8.2: “Recoveries.”

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Cover of WADE IN THE WATER by Tracy K. Smith

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Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith (Graywolf, 2019)

Please consider supporting an independent bookstore with your purchase.

As an APA–focused publication, Lantern Review stands for diversity within the literary world. In solidarity with other communities of color and in an effort to connect our readers with a wider range of voices, we recommend a different book by a non-APA-identified BIPOC poet in each blog post.

Poetry Toolkit: Holding Space for Grief & Healing in the Classroom

Header image. Poetry Toolkit: Holding Space for Grief & Healing in the Classroom. Gray and white text on a yellow watercolor-textured background. Black-and-white LR logo in the corner.

As I (Iris) write this, my heart is weary. Just last week, only one of the three police officers involved in the shooting of Breonna Taylor was charged—and not for her murder. The evening of that announcement, I spoke with a friend who lives in Louisville. She told me: we are tired, we are frustrated, we are angry. Still, there is no justice.

California, the state where I live, is still burning. Last week, I read about Kao Saelee, a Mien refugee whose family fled to the US when he was small. During the last two (also incredibly devastating) wildfire seasons, Saelee worked to control the blazes as an inmate firefighter. This August, on the day he was released from prison, California transferred him not to his sister’s waiting car but to ICE detainment. Still, there is no justice. 

And still, around us, pandemic rages. The government moves to erase systemic racial injustice from history textbooks. Egregious human rights violations continue to be visited upon the refugees incarcerated at our border. And on and on and on and on.

For a while now, we’ve wanted to share some tools for making space for grief and healing through poetry. We know that many of you are teachers working with young writers during this deeply difficult (even traumatic) year. As educators ourselves, we know how creative writing can sometimes allow students needed space and permission to process, to breathe. And as poets, we know how the act of writing into grief can sometimes offer us just enough self-compassion and strength to go on. That sometimes, in the midst of suffering, poetry allows us not just catharsis but also access—to hope, to meaningful remembrance, even to joy.

The below prompts (each based on poems by writers of color—some APA identified, some not) and their variations are written with teachers and students of particular age ranges in mind. But you could write into any of these prompts (regardless of how they’re labeled) outside an academic context, as well.

Continue reading “Poetry Toolkit: Holding Space for Grief & Healing in the Classroom” →

Six Questions for LR Editorial Intern Karen Zheng

Photo of Karen Zheng by Ray Ren (Poet with short hair and brown-rimmed glasses, wearing a black-and-white striped buttoned shirt and standing in front of a background of ivy)
LR Editorial Intern Karen Zheng (Photo by Ray Ren)

This fall, we’re privileged to welcome Karen Zheng onto the LR team as our editorial intern! Karen is a first-generation, queer, Chinese American undergraduate student at Dartmouth College studying English and creative writing (poetry). She is interested in exploring her intersectional identity in her creative work and, in her free time, hosts and produces the podcast Mx. Asian American. Karen will be helping us out behind the scenes with getting Issue 8.2 ready for publication, prepping social media content, and contributing to the blog. As you’ll be hearing from her from time to time, we thought we’d take a minute to help you get to know her. Read on to learn about Karen’s love for Ocean Vuong’s and Jericho Brown’s work, the activities that help her recharge when she’s not studying or writing, and more.

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LANTERN REVIEW: Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you come to poetry? 

KAREN ZHENG:  I started writing poetry in middle school. In seventh grade, we were studying Langston Hughes and Edgar Allan Poe. One of the assignments in that unit was to write our own poems. I remember we were studying Hughes’s “Mother to Son” and analyzing the crystal stair. We had to write something that was similar, using the same metaphor of stairs. After I wrote a draft and showed it to my teacher, Ms. Mickish, she told me that I had talent and encouraged me to pursue poetry further. Ever since then, I’ve been writing. 

LR: What obsessions drive your writing and other creative work? 

KZ:  One of my poetry professors, Vievee Francis, always talks about a poet’s obsession, something that the poet always goes back to, writes about, and thinks about. For me, my obsessions lie in my Asian Americanness, queerness, and other childhood trauma that came with the intersectionality of those two identities. I also dabble in other creative work like podcasting and dancing. In my podcast, I aim to highlight others in the Asian American community as role models because I never had those growing up. 

LR:  What are your favorite poets, poems, or poetry collections of the moment?

KZ:  Ocean Vuong is my all-time favorite poet. His memoir, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, is so painfully beautiful. Other poets that I really enjoy are Danez Smith, Victoria Chang, Chen Chen, Matthew Olzmann, Terrance Hayes, Illya Kaminsky, Tyehimba Jess, and Jericho Brown. Recently, I’ve been obsessed with Jericho Brown’s The Tradition.

LR: Go-to karaoke song? 

KZ:  I’m actually the mic hogger at karaoke, but I usually only sing Chinese songs. I always have to sing《其实都没有》by 杨宗纬.

LR: Self-care is so important for creatives, especially during these times! What’s your favorite self-care tip? 

KZ: “Relax” is probably the best tip in general. I have trouble relaxing. I get restless during breaks. Reminding myself it’s okay to watch a few more episodes of a show, to journal, to draw, to color, or to space out every once in a while is crucial. Allowing myself to indulge in these activities really helps me to refuel and recharge. 

LR: Who are your APA role models? What are your hopes for the future of APA lit? 

KZ: Honestly, there are so many role models out there. All the poets I just mentioned, those who are doing nonprofit work, entrepreneurs, fitness influencers, etc., etc. Here, I’d like to talk about the Asian Hustle Network. Asian Hustle Network is a Facebook group where hustlers, young professionals, entrepreneurs, creatives, and business owners from the Asian American community can come together and share their stories. Everybody there is so inspiring. It gives me hope for the community to continue growing and changing the world. My hope for the future of APA literature is for us to break into the “canon” and have APA literature be taught in schools, inspiring and influencing future generations. 

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We hope you’ll join us in warmly welcoming Karen to the LR team. We’re excited to have her on board this semester and can’t wait for you to hear more from her soon!

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Cover image: SEEING THE BODY by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Seeing the Body by Rachel Eliza Griffiths (Norton, 2020)
Please consider supporting a BIPOC-owned indie bookstore with your purchase.

As an APA–focused publication, Lantern Review stands for diversity within the literary world. In solidarity with other communities of color and in an effort to connect our readers with a wider range of voices, we recommend a different collection by a non-APA-identified BIPOC poet in each blog post.

An August APA Poetry Companion: Books to Celebrate the End of Summer

Header Image: An APA Poetry Companion, August 2020 (Cover images of the following books: W. Todd Kaneko, THIS IS HOW THE BONE SINGS; Sumita Chakraborty, ARROW; Jihyun Yun, SOME ARE ALWAYS HUNGRY; Kimberly Alidio, : ONCE TEETH BONES CORAL :, Barbara Jane Reyes, LETTERS TO A YOUNG BROWN GIRL; Aimee Nezhukumatathil, WORLD OF WONDERS; Sachiko Murakami, RENDER; Angie Sijun Lou, ALL WE ASK IS YOU TO BE HAPPY)
New and Notable APA Poetry Reads for August & September 2020

As the summer winds down and the academic year ramps up, here are just a few August and September books by APA poets that we’re excited to crack into.

FEATURED PICKS

Kimberly Alidio, : once teeth bones coral : (Belladonna*, Aug 2020)

We were delighted to learn that Issue 2 contributor Kimberly Alidio’s new book, : once teeth bones coral :, is out this month from Belladonna*. Alidio’s deft syntactical and structural play appears to be in full force in this new collection, about which Cheena Marie Lo writes, “Alidio’s poems reveal the ‘luminous familiar,’ traces of the interior that make visible the simultaneity of histories and futures, the possibilities inherent in queer connection, kinship, and refusal. These fragments are precise and expansive, and will resonate for a very long time.”

W. Todd Kaneko, This Is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence, Aug 2020)

Another book that we’re excited to see hit shelves this month is two-time contributor W. Todd Kaneko’s This Is How the Bone Sings. Kaneko’s second collection, This Is How the Bone Sings interrogates ancestry and fatherhood through myth, legend, and history, including the poet’s family’s experience in the Minidoka concentration camp during WWII. We’ve long admired the striking imagery and music of Kaneko’s work, and this new book promises to be no exception. (As a bonus, Kaneko’s poem “The Birds Know What They Mean,” which we published in Issue 7.2, appears in the book. If you enjoyed that piece as much as we did, we hope you’ll check out the collection, too!)

Barbara Jane Reyes, Letters to a Young Brown Girl (BOA, Sept 2020)

We’ve been looking forward to Issue 1 contributor Barbara Jane Reyes’s latest collection, a series of epistles addressed to young (especially Filipina/x) women of color, for months now. At a time when mentorship and the importance of literary lineages (especially feminist, WOC lineages) have been top of our minds, Reyes’s book seems especially timely. Writes Asa Drake in her review of the book for Entropy, “These are poems about what we give ourselves, rendered in language to assure the young brown girl writing in America that she is not alone. What is a mixtape if not a love letter that confirms we have all existed in the world, and we have been listening, perhaps together?” This is one love letter that we can’t wait to read.

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MORE NEW AND NOTEWORTHY TITLES

Sumita Chakraborty, Arrow (Alice James, Sep 2020)

Angie Sijun Lou, All We Ask Is You To Be Happy [Chapbook] (Gold Line Press, Aug 2020)

Sachiko Murakami, Render (Arsenal Pulp, Sep 2020)

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments [Essays] (Milkweed, Aug 2020)

Jihyun Yun, Some Are Always Hungry (U of Nebraska, Sep 2020)

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What new and notable books are on your reading list this month? Share your recommendations with us in the comments or on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram (@LanternReview).

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Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine  (Graywolf, Sep 2020)
Please consider supporting a Black-owned bookstore with your purchase.

As an Asian American–focused publication, Lantern Review is committed to promoting diverse voices within the literary world. In solidarity with the Black community and in an effort to amplify Black voices in poetry, we’re sharing a different book by a Black poet in each of our blog posts this summer.

LR News: LR on Sundress’s Publishing Roundtable

Sundress Roundtable logo: three cartoon speech bubbles of different shapes—one pale blue, one pale purple, and one pale green—with the words "Sundress Roundtable" overlaid on the foremost (purple) bubble.
Sundress Roundtable: So You Want to Start a Literary Journal (Part 1 | Part 2)

Recently, I [Iris] had the opportunity to participate in a two-part roundtable on Sundress Publications’ blog with a few other literary journal founders. As we just celebrated the tenth anniversary of LR‘s first issue this summer (and are almost at eleven years in existence on the internet—our blog first went live in fall of 2009), it was especially meaningful to get to look back and reflect on our early years. It was also fascinating to hear from the other editors about their publications’ stories and how, like us, many of them began their journals in response to a felt need or representational gap in the literary landscape. For Mia and me, the work of creating and publishing LR has felt as much like a journey of self-discovery (for us as writers, editors, teachers, collaborators, and friends) as it has been an opportunity to serve by carving out a space for our community, and it was lovely to hear and learn from what others have figured out—about themselves, about editing, about running a journal, about literary impact and community—along the way. Our thanks to Sundress Publications and to panel coordinator Marci Calibretta Cancio-Bello (from Print-Oriented Bastards) for the opportunity, as well as to fellow panelists Sarah Clark (from ANMLY, beestung, Bettering American Poetry), Sarah Feng (from COUNTERCLOCK Journal), and Luther Hughes (from Shade Literary Arts) for their insights!

To see our conversation, head on over to these posts on Sundress’s blog:

Sundress Roundtable: So You Want to Start a Literary Journal, Part 1

Sundress Roundtable: So You Want to Start a Literary Journal, Part 2

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If you’ve ever founded a journal yourself, what are some of the things you’ve learned along the way? (Or if you’re thinking of starting a journal, what questions do you have?) We’d love to hear from you! Drop us a note in the comments in the comments or on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram (@LanternReview).

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The Tradition by Jericho Brown (Copper Canyon, 2019)
Please consider supporting a Black-owned bookstore with your purchase.

As an Asian American–focused publication, Lantern Review is committed to promoting diverse voices within the literary world. In solidarity with the Black community and in an effort to amplify Black voices in poetry, we’re sharing a different book by a Black poet in each of our blog posts this summer.

10 Years of LR | Process Profile: Lee Herrick on “The House Is Quiet, Except”

In celebration of our magazine’s ten-year anniversary, we’ve been catching up with past contributors via our process profile series. Today, in the last of this summer’s series, Issue 6 contributor Lee Herrick reflects back on his poem “The House Is Quiet, Except.”

LR: Celebrating 10 Years, 2010–2020; Process Profile: Lee Herrick. Photograph of Lee Herrick (Asian American poet with short hair and dark-rimmed glasses standing against a background of greenery).
Issue 6 contributor Lee Herrick (Photo by Curtis Messer)

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When my daughter first touched a book, she slid her tiny finger along the soft, padded page of the picture book like it was a kind of miraculous discovery. By the time she began to read, she often sat with her legs crossed on the ground near a bookshelf while she read. Once, on the occasion that inspired this poem, she was reading and whispering the words into the air, and it struck me: What might she be discovering? What worlds is she entering?

In “The House Is Quiet, Except,” I imagined her future life like I imagine most parents imagine about their children. More than anything, I want her to be happy and to have the fortitude to make it through the unhappy times. I hope she knows that she is loved. I hope she will find love or that love finds her, whatever form it takes. I don’t know if she will ever need saving, but I want her to know that books can save us in times of despair, isolation, or doubt, and that there is something living or holy inside of a book, like there is inside of us. She’s a teenager now, and she is still a voracious reader. It calms me to know how she loves books.

Watching my daughter read is watching her world grow. I think of the hundreds of years before us, the hundreds of years after us, and the gift of the present moment—how these merge into a good book and surge through us, our lives.

The biggest challenge in this poem was cutting it down, finding enough precision but letting it breathe enough. Speaking to the joys and wonders of fatherhood but not getting lost in sentiment. The last line of the poem was imagined, partially. I can’t be sure there was a light around her body. But I can’t be sure there wasn’t.

I wrote this poem almost as a meditation, and it became the last poem in Scar and Flower.

With her permission, when I read the poem to an audience, it’s often the final poem. There’s a hopeful finality that also opens back up at the end of a good book. I wanted this feeling in the poem, too. 

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Lee Herrick is the author of Scar and Flower and two other books of poems, Gardening Secrets of the Dead and This Many Miles from Desire. He is coeditor of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books, 2020). His poems appear widely in literary magazines, textbooks, and anthologies such as One for the Money: The Sentence as Poetic Form; Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice, with an introduction by Common; Here: Poems for the Planet, with an introduction by the Dalai Lama; California Fire and Water; and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, among others. Born in Daejeon, Korea, and adopted to the United States at ten months, he served as Fresno Poet Laureate from 2015–2017. He lives in Fresno, California, and teaches at Fresno City College and the MFA Program at Sierra Nevada University.

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Forest Primeval by Vievee Francis (Northwestern University Press, 2015)
Please consider supporting a Black-owned bookstore with your purchase.

As an Asian American-focused publication, Lantern Review is committed to promoting diverse voices within the literary world. In solidarity with the Black community and in an effort to amplify Black voices in poetry, we’re sharing a different book by a Black poet in each of our blog posts this summer.

Issue 8.1: Celebrating Ten Years of LR

Cover Image: LANTERN REVIEW Issue 8.1, "Remnants" (featuring Miya Sukune's oil painting "Looking to the Horizon": scene from an artist's workshop with a bass drum pedal, succulent, stone, eraser, paint brushes, and palette on a paint-streaked wood table. On the window and hanging from it are a sand dollar, a small statue, a spherical glass suncatcher, and another potted plant. Out the window, we can see snowcapped mountains and trees in the distance.)
LANTERN REVIEW Issue 8.1: “Remnants“

We’re so very excited this morning to announce the release of our tenth-anniversary issue—Issue 8.1, “Remnants.” Featuring new poems by four of our past contributors (Rajiv Mohabir, Khaty Xiong, Vuong Vu, and Luisa A. Igloria) in addition to artist Miya Sukune’s stunning oil paintings, this slim but powerful volume serves as a celebration of past, present, and future.

Over the past ten years, we’ve had the opportunity to publish the poetry, prose, translations, and artwork of 107 writers and 27 visual artists in the magazine’s pages—as well as countless more curated writing prompts, interviews, reviews, process profiles, reflections, and featured poems (written by a combination of staff and guest contributors) for our blog. We’re incredibly indebted to you, our community—the readers, contributors, staff, partners, family, and friends who’ve read and commented on the blog and magazine, submitted work, subscribed to our newsletter, attended our events, volunteered your time and resources, visited our table at book fairs and literary festivals, and shared our content. 2020 feels, by all accounts, like a strange and difficult year in which to be celebrating anything, but as we reflect back on where we’ve come, we can’t help but feel both immense gratitude and renewed determination for the road ahead. The past ten years have only served to strengthen our deep belief in the necessity of poetry and in the rich, vibrant beacon that is the APA literary landscape. We look forward to continuing the work of highlighting and celebrating APA poetry—in concert with our community and in solidarity with others—in the years to come.

Thank you for your support throughout the years, and cheers to the future of APA poetry! We hope you’ll enjoy Issue 8.1.

Enter Lantern Review 8.1: “Remnants”

With peace, light, and unending gratitude,

Iris & Mia
LR Editors

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Cover Image: CATALOG OF UNABASHED GRATITUDE by Ross Gay

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay (U of Pittsburgh Press, 2015)
Please consider supporting a Black-owned bookstore with your purchase.

As an Asian American–focused publication, Lantern Review is committed to promoting diverse voices within the literary world. In solidarity with the Black community and in an effort to amplify Black voices in poetry, we’ll be sharing a different book by a Black poet in each of our blog posts this summer.

Rajiv Mohabir’s “Daughter of the Sea, Child of Mountain” (Featured Poem)

LR: Featured Poem. Daughter of the Sea, Child of Mountain. Rajiv Mohabir. Photo: poet with shaved head, goatee, and glasses, wearing a gray blazer and various accessories (including a starry whale pin on the lapel). He looks into the camera thoughtfully with head tipped to one side and chin poised in his right hand.
Rajiv Mohabir (Photo by the author)

This morning, we’re sharing a new poem and reflection from Issue 2 contributor Rajiv Mohabir. As our nation enters the fourth week after the murder of George Floyd, Mohabir sings a prayer over his sister’s newborn child even as he wrestles with the ways in which legacies of colonial oppression have intersected with anti-Black racism in his family. “What new world will I help to create for my Saiya?” he writes. His words remind us that combating injustice is an urgent task that requires faith and sustained labor—and that we must not allow ourselves to weary as we continue the work of interrogating and uprooting systems of racial oppression within our nation, ourselves, and even, sometimes, our own cultures and families. Here is Mohabir—in his own words.

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We are watching Black people die disproportionately in the United States. COVID-19 threatening Black communities, the police hunting Black bodies. It’s time to become the ancestors who fought for Black liberation. My sister gave birth on February 20, 2020, to a Black child with eyes like moons. She gave birth to a Black child in the middle of a global pandemic. A moonrise in the middle of a global pandemic. What new world will I help to create for my Saiya? This poem came to me as a prayer while considering my extended family’s anti-Black racism in the United States, Canada, and England. Being Guyanese immigrants for their generation meant fleeing oppressive regimes, only to vilify Black bodies.

What does it mean to be in a precarious body, to be brown, and to ally with family and friends despite the define and rule lingering in our psyches, gifted to us by our colonial masters? What about how Hinduism is mobilized against Black communities in Guyanese and Caribbean practice? What about how Hinduism is the machine of savarna oppression; mobilized into anti-Muslim and anti-Dalit violence? What if I am queer and have ancestors with unknown and Dalit histories? These are some questions I have been grappling with for years.

I do know that queerness disrupts colonizing logics. I do know that somewhere in my ancestry were casteless people who fought for their rights and the rights of the people around them. This poem is a prayer to a casteless goddess of rage and vengeance that lives inside of us all. She is the Lord that is you and me. I summon her to summon courage to act against these calculated deaths engineered by the United States government.

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Rajiv Mohabir

Daughter of the Sea, Child of Mountain

In mornings of thick gravity
to see through tears and police
teargas, against the government’s
buffalo head impervious to man,
make me queer and animal;
place in my hands your lotus
of creation, your trident of ruin,
that I may gallop on tiger-back, teeth
bared, loose haired, that I may
trample under red foot, injustice—
Hindus who raze Dalit and masjid;
America that smashes Black bodies
under knee. Here, I raise your sword;
Goddess, I am your conch.

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Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize; Eric Hoffer Honorable Mention 2018) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books 2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize, Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (Kaya Press 2019), which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award. His memoir won 2019 Reckless Books’ New Immigrant Writing Prize and is forthcoming 2021. Currently he is assistant professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College and translations editor at Waxwing journal.

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Cover image of THE JANUARY CHILDREN by Safia Elhillo

The January Children by Safia Elhillo (U of Nebraska Press, 2017)
Please consider supporting a Black-owned bookstore with your purchase.

As an Asian American–focused publication, Lantern Review is committed to promoting diverse voices within the literary world. In solidarity with the Black community and in an effort to amplify Black voices in poetry, we’ll be sharing a different book by a Black poet in each of our blog posts this summer.

10 Years of LR | Process Profile: Brynn Saito on “Dinuba, 1959”

In celebration of our magazine’s ten-year anniversary, we’re catching up with past contributors this summer via our process profile series. In today’s profile, Issue 6 contributor Brynn Saito reflects back on her poem “Dinuba, 1959.”

LR: Celebrating 10 Years, 2010–2020; Process Profile: Brynn Saito. Photograph of Brynn Saito (Asian American poet with shoulder-length hair standing at a 3/4 angle against a black background)
Issue 6 contributor Brynn Saito (Photo by Schoenwald Photography)

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Inspired by communion with a photograph, this short poem inquires into the life and spirit of my mother, Janelle Oh Saito. In the photograph, my mother is about five years old, appearing as the poem describes: bright-eyed before the Dinuba, CA, farmhouse in a white dress. Rereading it now, I see how much my “terrible need to know” has shaped my poetics over the course of the last decade, in the time since the poem manifested itself on the page. In my mother, I’ve forever intuited an unsheltered, untouched wonder—a powerful wonder that tips into joy and laughter so easily. Alongside this energy, I’ve felt a fiery rage, born from what she endured as a child and fueling her current community work. In trying to understand her life, her personhood, I was—I am—subconsciously seeking to know something elemental about myself and something true about the histories shaping our family and making possible the worlds awaiting us. The photograph, then, was a portal to past and future. 

Saito’s mother circa 1959 in Dinuba, CA (Photo courtesy of the author)

I’ve returned, after nearly twenty years away, to my hometown of Fresno, CA, to live. Fresno is the primary city in the middle of the sprawling Central Valley—the valley where my immigrant elders labored; to where my grandparents returned after the Japanese American incarceration of World War II; where my mother’s grandparents settled after fleeing Korea, which, at the turn of the twentieth century, was suffering and surviving under the brutal Japanese occupation. My “terrible need to know,” first articulated in this poem, has, in the short time I’ve been back, unearthed new stories from the memory trove. Closer now to the land that made us and living about a mile from my parents’ house, I’ve become a listener and recorder. (Visit Dear— to see one community-based poetry project that has bloomed into a living archive of letters and portraits.) I’ve also nudged my mother (and father) into writing and telling their own stories, which they’ve performed before large audiences—something I never expected to see. 

“I know who she becomes and why,” goes the poem. “But the how will escape me / continues to escape me.” Will, perhaps, always escape me, as our knowledge of the past is forever incomplete. But a desire fills that gap—an imaginative power that drew me to the photograph and draws me still: to the wellspring of memory and feeling, to a place beyond language where I commune with the energies that came before me, where I remember and make whole the body of my future self. 

“Dinuba, CA, 1959” was published six years ago in Lantern Review, scrawled (most likely) in a workshop setting, and chiseled down to its three sentences for its inclusion in my second book. Today, it continues to undisguise itself, reveal itself—as the most lasting poems (and people and places) do.

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Brynn Saito is the author of two books of poetry from Red Hen Press: Power Made Us Swoon (2016) and The Palace of Contemplating Departure (2013), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She recently authored the chapbook Dear—, commissioned by Densho, an organization dedicated to sharing the story of the World War II–era incarceration of Japanese Americans. Brynn is assistant professor of creative writing in the English Department at Fresno State and codirector of Yonsei Memory Project. More at brynnsaito.com and yonseimemoryproject.com.

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As an Asian American-focused publication, Lantern Review is committed to promoting diverse voices within the literary world. In solidarity with the Black community and in an effort to amplify Black voices in poetry, we’ll be sharing a different book by a Black poet in each of our blog posts this summer.