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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ALSO RECOMMENDED

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.

Four Diverse Books That Are Challenging American Poetry

Four Diverse Books That Are Challenging American Poetry

This past summer, the NEH released data that sent news outlets into a frenzy: over the past five years, the number of poetry readers has nearly doubled to 28 million adults. To us, this news was incredibly validating and exciting, given the staggering variety of powerful contemporary poems we’ve been lucky to read and publish over the years. Even as we’ve cultivated Lantern Review as a space for Asian American poetry, we recognize that the lantern is a symbol of enlightenment across cultures, a guiding light that celebrates continued exploration of disparate but interlocking communities. So this month, we pay homage to our namesake and highlight four recent poetry titles that we’ve loved for the ways they’ve challenged exclusionary definitions of “Americanness” in political, social, and literary life. Whether you are a regular reader of poetry or a newcomer to verse, we hope these books can serve as a guide to the diverse traditions of American poetry.

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American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, selected by Tracy K. Smith (Graywolf, 2018)

The title of US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s anthology invokes past laureate Robert Hayden and his poem, “[American Journal].” But while Hayden’s speaker is an alien who observes “the americans     this baffling / multi people” from the outside in, Smith’s assembled communities of voices consider their various amorphous Americas from the interior. Several of our favorite APA poets—such as Tina Chang, Cathy Park Hong, Solmaz Sharif, and John Yau—appear among the radiant, haunting, and witty voices herein. Wrought from revenge for seized land, the joys of fatherhood, the despair of unimaginable loss, the wonder of what remains, these selected poems—or “reports,” as Smith calls them—consider and coax and challenge borders at a moment when our definitions of “nation” and “neighbor” are increasingly unstable.

Citizen Illegal by José Olivarez (Haymarket Books, 2018)

Citizen Illegal is a fierce and playful rewrite of America through Chicanx experiences. José Olivarez exposes the quintessential dissonance and violence of everyday America—in one poem, a white partygoer claims the absence of Mexicans in “this part of New York City” even as the speaker beholds a waiter who “pushes his brown self through the kitchen door” (31). But if white supremacy systematically negates black, brown, and indigenous experiences, Olivarez is a cunning new architect who seizes and repurposes that scaffold. By Olivarez’s pen, heaven is no longer the sterile playspace of the white and moneyed. Instead, it is “gross” (a space where Mexican women can finally revel in novelas), and it is intimate (there are no gentrifiers who destroy family and language). Each poem is unsparing, negating white America’s practices of erasure and affirming Mexican American experiences with song.

bury it by sam sax (Wesleyan University Press, 2018)

The crevices between boy and monster, dead and undead are dangerously thin, and sam sax toes the line brilliantly. He concludes this, his second collection, with a hefty question: “how deep am i indebted to the dead?” (83). The book strives to answer this from the beginning. In the first poem, a fisherman perceives a tug and pulls up “boy, // after boy, / after boy, / after boy, / …” (1). The confessional intertwines with the surreal in these poems of mourning, which salute gay teens lost to suicide, forebears consumed by AIDS, and betraying lovers who have in turn been betrayed by others. This collection is sax’s incantation of a vital lineage—including figures like W. H. Auden, James Baldwin, Tyler Clementi—that makes the dead marvelously undead.

If They Come For Us by Fatimah Asghar (OneWorld, 2018)

If They Come For Us reminds us that the titular question may not be “if” but “when.” Fatimah Asghar writes from her personal and political history as the daughter of Pakistani, Kashmiri, and Muslim diasporas, observing that any sense of material and emotional security must reconcile with the knowledge that “I build & build / & someone takes it away.” In response, Asghar fashions poems that probe brutality while preserving the ordinary: She describes an encounter between her Barbies and stuffed animals, an erotic playdate that devolves into military conquest (35). She points out that perpetrators of ethnic cleansing and genocide during the India/Pakistan partition of 1947 were “Men who wear matching shirts,” “neighbors who like to kill each other” (16). Her measured observations of the ordinary also honor the notions of shelter, kin, and abundance—which are not lost to bloodshed and trauma but are grounded in an auntie’s laughter, a track team’s devotion, and endless jello at the Old Country Buffet. In her essay “Against Witness,” Cathy Park Hong argues that poetry has failed remembrance in this “era of total recall.” Accordingly, Asghar’s poems propel beyond memory and instead stage everyday scenes that grapple with historical atrocity and personal loss. A continuing legacy of violence, she reminds us, “is the cost / of looking the other way.”

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As always, there are so many more incredible new collections than we have space to describe. Here are just a few other other recent books, including a few of this year’s National Book Awards’ finalists, that have been on our radar for the ways in which they push or transform the boundaries of Americanness and American poetry:

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes (Penguin, 2018)

Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018)

Eye Level by Jenny Xie (Graywolf Press, 2018)

Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Copper Canyon Press, 2018)

Not Here by Hieu Minh Nguyen (Coffee House Press, 2018)

We Play A Game by Duy Doan (Yale University Press, 2018)

The Buddha Wonders if She Is Having a Mid-Life Crisis by Luisa A. Igloria (Phoenicia Publishing, 2018)

Bird of the Indian Subcontinent by Subhashini Kaligotla (The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, 2018)

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What boundary-transgressing collections would you recommend to new readers of poetry? To old-timers? Share them with us in the comments or let us know on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram (@LanternReview).

Curated Prompt: Aimee Nezhukumatathil – “The World is Full of Paper: Writing Epistolary Poems (Epistles)”

Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Aimee Nezhukumatathil

In celebration of APIA Heritage Month, we’re continuing our annual tradition of asking respected teachers and writers of Asian American poetry to share favorite writing exercises with us on successive Fridays during May. This week’s installment was contributed by Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

Stationery
by Agha Shahid Ali

The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert
in great sheets, reams
of silver handmade by you.
The night is your cottage industry now,
the day is your brisk emporium.
The world is full of paper.
Write to me.

The Context

The hand-lettered envelope. The canceled stamp. The tooth of the paper that nibbles the ink. The epistle is a type of poem that underscores the best intimacies that can arise from a letter: the measured and focused address to a specific recipient. In a world that values the addictive glow of a screen, the speedy text message, the quick hello and check-in—much can be gained and admired in a poem that follows the ancient and simple form of a letter.

The word epistle comes from the Latin word (espistula) for letter. In the Middle Ages, the art of letter writing was often taught as a necessity for building community and encouraging discourse. In fact, the writing of epistles was actually amplified as old road structures began to decay and crumble. Travel became increasingly difficult—people soon relied on letter writing to conduct and negotiate business in place of making a claim in person. Another variation of the epistle is one that Ovid himself employed—epistles as a way to explore persona. In his Heroides, he imagines letters written by neglected or abandoned heroines of Greek mythology: writing as Penelope to Odysseus, writing as Helen to Paris, as Medea to Jason.

When is the last time you opened your mailbox and found a bona fide hand-written letter? So much of mail these days is ‘sad mail’—coupon flyers, missing children notices, bills, sweepstakes packets. But oh the joy and delight when you find your name written by a friend or loved one’s hand! Or the surprise and mysterious architecture of a handwriting you’ve never seen before! When was the last time you wrote a letter?

The Exercise

Feel free to mimic the relationship uncovered within most epistles—the letter poem is addressed to someone ‘you’ can’t talk to for whatever reason—the person is far away or deceased or famous, or even someone you know well, but you can’t say what needs to be said in real life. It should be clear to the reader who is being addressed within the title or the first few lines. There are no meter or rhyme rules for this form. This type of poem is more of a vehicle to explore persona and voice.

Still stuck? Write an epistle to any of the following: 1) an animal or plant, 2) yourself, ten years ago, 3) yourself, twenty years ago 4) your beloved, twenty years ago, 5) a future version of you, even if the future you imagine is simply ‘tomorrow’ 6) a company or corporation 7) one of the seven deadly sins or virtues (ie. Dear Lust,… or Dear Patience,…) 8) your zodiac or birthstone 9) your favorite “guilty pleasure” food or 10) the city you call ‘home’ in all its complicated and wondrous glory.

The Why

I’ve found that writing a poem TO someone (or some-thing!) makes the edges of imagery focus crisper into view. And in that focused state, the epistle begins to tighten up the rest of the poem’s language so that a distinct persona emerges and establishes a clear and immediate tone and mood in ways that other poems might not. And yet, writing a letter to a stranger takes the innate intimacy of an epistle a step further: it requires the invention of an imagined other (even if the person exists, he/she is still being imagined), and it fashions a sort of detailed handiwork about why we might find ourselves wishing to talk to them. And isn’t that such a good and necessary occupation, a welcome slowing down and stepping away from a handheld device or screen? I like to think of writing epistles as a writing towards—and attempting to love, or at least recognize—the strangers that live inside each of us.

For More Inspiration:

“Frame, an Epistle,” by Claudia Emerson

“note, passed to superman,” by Lucille Clifton

“Letter to Simic from Boulder,” by Richard Hugo

“As Children Together,” by Carolyn Forché

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Aimee Nezhukumatathil is professor of English at State University of New York–Fredonia, where she teaches creative writing and environmental literature. She is the author of three poetry collections: Lucky Fish (2011), winner of the gold medal in poetry from the Independent Publisher Book Awards and the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize for Independent Books; At the Drive-In Volcano (2007), winner of the Balcones Prize; and Miracle Fruit (2003), winner of the Tupelo Press Prize, ForeWord magazine’s Book of the Year Award, the Global Filipino Award. Poems and essays are widely published in venues such as Tin House, Ploughshares, Orion, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and noted in Best American Essays. Other honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Western New York in the middle of berry country with her husband and young sons.

A Conversation with Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of Lucky Fish, winner of the Eric Hoffer Prize, and At the Drive-In Volcano, winner of the Balcones Prize. Her first book, Miracle Fruit, won the Tupelo Press Prize, the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in poetry, and the Global Filipino Award. Her poetry and essays have been widely anthologized and have appeared or forthcoming in: American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, FIELD, Shenandoah, Mid-American Review, and Tin House. Her writing has been awarded the Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts in poetry. She is associate professor of English at SUNY-Fredonia where she was awarded a Chancellor’s Medal of Excellence. She lives in western New York with her husband and their two young sons.

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LR: Your first book, Miracle Fruit, won the 2003 Tupelo Press Prize, the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in poetry, and the Global Filipino Award. Could you describe the journey that Miracle Fruit took from birth to publication?

AN: A good third of it was from my thesis from The Ohio State University (my MFA is also in creative non-fiction) but I had a magical and productive year as a poetry fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing in Madison and that allowed me the time and resources to write the rest of it. I queried a few publishers directly and received lots of positive feedback so I decided to try my hand in two contests—one of them was, at the time, a relatively new press—Tupelo Press—and I about fainted when I got the email that Greg Orr selected my book as the eventual winner that year. I hadn’t even completely unpacked yet. I was twenty-six and had just moved to western NY for my first year teaching at SUNY-Fredonia.

LR: Your poetry often uses fanciful imagery and direct tones of address (as in “First Anniversary, With Monkeys” and “Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?”) to relay moments of intimacy and elements of personal experience. What kind of poetic decisions do you find yourself making when you work with autobiographical subject matter?

AN: I try not to bore myself. And talking solely about myself bores me. And I admittedly have a relatively short attention span. And I’m always thinking of two or three things at once when I write. So, the trick for me is to be able to type or write as fast as the images leap in my head. I know I’m onto something if a metaphor startles or surprises me—I’ll try to hang on and follow that golden thread for as long as it will let me. I believe in an underworld littered with gems. In another life, I have to.

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Review: AALR, VOL. 2, ISSUE 1

The Asian American Literary Review | Volume 2, Issue 1 | Winter/Spring 2011

In Gerald Maa’s interview with Arthur Sze in this issue of the Asian American Literary Review, Maa quotes from Auden: “Many things can be said against anthologies, but for an adolescent to whom even the names of most of the poets are unknown, a good [anthology] can be an invaluable instructor.” The same can be said of this 300-page journal, with its wide range of material including: a forum discussion with some of the editors about the “check all that apply” race option on the 2010 Census, an enclosed DVD of Kip Fulbeck’s video short Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids, and a complete bibliography of Carlos Bulosan provided by the Library of Congress’s Asian American Pacific Islander Collection. This is all in addition to fiction, memoir, poetry, interviews with Arthur Sze (on editing Chinese Writers on Writing) and Chang-rae Lee (on his most recent novel, The Surrendered), book reviews, documentary photography, and a short graphic piece.

This issue’s theme is “Counting Citizens” and begins with a discussion about the question of multiracial self-representation on the Census. Jeffrey Yang takes a stance against the very structures of any representation and rejects claims for a ‘post-racial’ present: “not representation but transmutation, alchemy. . . . Representation is the impossible ideal of our democracy, where influence rules.” Srikanth Reddy uses the development of Walt Whitman’s poetry as a model, charting his expansive ownership of multitudes to his subjective position as an individual: “This progression—from the poet as a vatic representative of everybody to the poet as a specimen capable only of registering her own experience—might in some ways be a natural progression, from the exuberance of youth to the epistemological modesty of old age.” He suggests an alternative perspective: that of the Other. Yang riffs on this and together they broach the aesthetic of language arts and “the problem of form—the ‘logic and order’ of an artwork” which seems to find friction between the canon and the margin. A different take on Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” perhaps, in which the artist is in constant tension between the codified mastery of forebears and the yet unnamed mystery of the present/future individual. Linguistic and cultural transplantation complicate loyalties, heritage, assumptions about audience, and formal considerations. Reddy writes:

To write a haiku or a ghazal in English does not bring us any closer to shifting the grounds of literary representation. In Yang’s memorable formulation, such a literary gesture would fail to “reposition the frame structure.” Rather, our formal labor [as Asian American writers] has to occur beyond the frame, in the abstract conceptual space where form is given particular shapes suited to the particular historical moment.

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On the Small Press and Asian American Poetry: Tupelo Press

A selection of offerings from Tupelo Press's list

A Guest Post by Stephen Hong Sohn, Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University

Stephen H. Sohn

In an earlier post, I had the chance to discuss the exciting growth in Asian American cultural production via the small press, especially as it has impacted poetic projects and publications.  In this post, I’d like to concentrate on Tupelo Press, another small press that has developed an outstanding catalog which includes both Asian and Asian American poets.  Among the offerings in Tupelo’s current catalog are:

Night, Fish, and Charlie Parker by Phan Nhien Hao (translated by Linh Dinh)

Abiding Places by Ko Un

Ardor by Karen An-hwei Lee

Why is the Edge Always Windy? by Mong-Lan

At the Drive-In Volcano by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Miracle Fruit by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

In the Mynah Bird’s Own Words (chapbook) by Barbara Tran

In this post, I will concentrate most specifically on Barbara Tran’s In the Mynah Bird’s Own Words, Karen An-hwei Lee’s Ardor and Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s At the Drive-In Volcano and Miracle Fruit.

Tran’s chapbook is one that I have chosen to teach for my Introduction to Asian American Literature course.  What I find so breathtaking about Tran’s work is her clarity of image, which always imparts a precise sense of a given moment or time through its use of lyric.  The chapbook also has a clear sense of lyrical trajectory.  The earlier poems seem to be invested in rooting out heritage and ethnic origin, especially as rendered through a growing romantic relationship.  The latter poems dig more deeply into the diasporic trajectory.  It is here where the chapbook becomes more autobiographically inflected.

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