An Asian American Poetry Companion: Mesmerizing Reads for APA Heritage Month (May 2022)

Header image. An Asian American Poetry Companion: May 2022. Cover images of Time Regime by Jhani Randhawa, Becoming AppalAsian by Lisa Kwong, Wanna Peek into My Notebook? by Barbara Jane Reyes, Spooks by Stella Wong, Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong, Girl 2.0 by Nora Hikari, The Convert's Heart Is Good to Eat by Melody S. Gee, Dear God, Dear Bones, Dear Yellow by Noor Hindi, The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang, You Cannot Resist Me When My Hair Is in Braids by Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, That Blue Trickster Time by Amy Uyematsu, As She Appears by Shelley Wong.
New and Notable Books by Asian American Poets for May 2022

Our Asian American Poetry Companion series is back, bringing you new titles that you won’t want to miss this May! Get ready to celebrate APA Heritage Month with a deep dive into some mesmerizing new books from Asian American poets. 

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FROM THE LR COMMUNITY

Melody S. Gee, The Convert’s Heart Is Good to Eat, (Driftwood, May 2022) 

Melody S. Gee returns with her latest collection, The Convert’s Heart Is Good to Eat. If you enjoyed her poem “And So More” in Issue 7.3, The Convert’s Heart Is Good to Eat may be the perfect thing for you to pick up this month. Out now from Driftwood Press. 

Barbara Jane Reyes, Wanna Peek into My Notebook? Notes on Pinay Liminality, (Paloma, March 2022)

Issue 1 contributor Barbara Jane Reyes reclaims Pinay spaces through her exploration of diasporic Pinay poetics in this collection of lyric essays. If you enjoyed her two most recent collections, Letters to a Young Brown Girl and Invocation to Daughters, you’ll definitely want to pick this new volume up as well. Out now from Paloma Press. 

Amy Uyematsu, That Blue Trickster Time, (Bateau, March 2022)

Amy Uyematsu’s newest collection affirms Asian American identity in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching back into her own family’s experience of incarceration during World War II and lifting up strong female elders from across time. If you enjoyed her poems “Thriftstore Haiku” in Issue 5 or “The Bachi-Bachi Buddhahead Blues” in Issue 7.2, be sure to put this collection down on your reading list for the spring. Out now with What Books Press. 

Ocean Vuong, Time Is A Mother, (Penguin Random House, April 2022) 

Ocean Vuong’s much-anticipated second collection, Time Is A Mother, is finally out from Penguin Random House! LR readers have been enjoying Vuong’s work since Issue 1, long before his novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, catapulted him into the national spotlight. If you enjoyed his previous collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, you’ll be sure to enjoy diving into his powerful return to poetry this spring.

Shelley Wong, As She Appears, (YesYes, May 2022) 

If you enjoyed Shelley Wong’s poem “Rivets and Cables” in Issue 6, get ready for her debut collection, As She Appears. Wong writes for queer women of color, rethinking the many different ways in which women take up space, and inviting them to appear as they are. As She Appears is available now from YesYes Books.

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MORE NEW & NOTEWORTHY PICKS

Victoria Chang, The Trees Witness Everything, (Copper Canyon, April 2022)

Nora Hikari, Girl 2.0, (Seven Kitchens, March 2022)

Noor Hindi, Dear God, Dear Bones, Dear Yellow, (Haymarket, May 2022)

Lisa Kwong, Becoming AppalAsian, (Glass Lyre, April 2022)

Jhani Randhawa, Time Regime, (Gaudy Boy, April 2022)

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, You Cannot Resist Me When My Hair Is in Braids, (Wayne State UP, March 2022)

Stella Wong, Spooks, (Saturnalia, March 2022)

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What titles are you putting on your reading list for APA Heritage Month? We’d love to hear more about what you’re starting the summer off with! Share your recommendations with us in the comments or on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram (@lanternreview).

ALSO RECOMMENDED

Cover image of Broken Halves of a Milky Sun by Aaiun Nin

Broken Halves of a Milky Sun by Aaiún Nin (Astra House, 2022)

Please consider supporting a small press or independent 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.

Panax Ginseng: The Other Wonders At Hawai’i

Panax Ginseng is a bi-monthly column by Henry W. Leung exploring linguistic and geographic borders in Asian American literature, especially those with hybrid genres, forms, vernaculars, and visions. The column title suggests the English language’s congenital borrowings and derives from the Greek panax, meaning “all-heal,” together with the Cantonese jansam, meaning “man-root.” This perhaps troubling image of one’s roots as panacea informs the column’s readings.

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 moore1 moore2
spahr1 spahr2 wang1

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It is by speaking of the “assumption of the myths of a race not [her] own, a race nearly annihilated by [her] kind” that Susanna Moore begins her quasi-memoir, I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai‘i (National Geographic 2003). She describes her “self-delighting pride at being a liminal participant in an authentic culture that continues, despite attempts to the contrary, to fear the ghostly night marchers . . .” This prefatory remark appears to apologize for her presumptions as a white woman writing about an island where she grew up with considerable privilege. Yet, notice the qualifiers—“self-delighting,” “liminal,” “authentic”—as they progress from the private to the public along a claim toward ownership. Identity politics frustrate me to no end, but as poetry and nonfiction on the subject of Hawaii have been coming across my desk recently, I have started to see that perhaps nobody can uncontestably write or rewrite Hawaii, not even those with genealogical ties to the native Hawaiians: for to call them natives today is to codify culture into a prelapsarian nostalgia, to selectively deny cultural change. I also wonder about recent mainland literatures about Hawaii and to what degree their conservatism and transgressions are intrinsic. I intend to look briefly here at three writers who claim a conflicted connection to Hawaii through the tension of poetic language: Susanna Moore, who lived on Oahu from early adolescence until she was a teenager; Juliana Spahr, who taught at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for half a decade; and Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, who has been “going home” to the Big Island from the Midwest since her parents retired there. Each of their works brushes against the usual tropes that brand a Hawaiian text when written in English, such as provincial or pastoral expectations, a stylized pidgin lexicon, and a mystified engagement with history. Yet, our three writers clearly feel their outsiderness, and, in order to make meaning and make meaning communicable as required by their poetics, they find nuanced rhetorical forms to grant themselves permission. Continue reading “Panax Ginseng: The Other Wonders At Hawai’i” →