An Asian American Poetry Companion: Fresh Books for Fall 2021

An Asian American Poetry Companion: September 2021. Cover images of the following books, clockwise from top left: THE CURIOUS THING by Sandra Lim, ORDINARY ANNALS by Monica Mody, YELLOW RAIN by Mai Der Vang, ORIGIN STORY by Gary Jackson, CUTLISH by Rajiv Mohabir, VIRGA by Shin Yu Pai, O.B.B. by Paolo Javier, THE LAST THING by Patrick Rosal.
New and Notable Asian American Poetry Books for Early Fall 2021

Even we find ourselves at the close of another challenging summer, Asian American voices continue to shine in print. Earlier this year, we celebrated the proliferation of spring Asian American poetry releases. Today, we’re excited to highlight just a small portion of the new and forthcoming works coming out of the AsAm poetry community this fall.

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FEATURED PICKS:

Gary Jackson, origin story (U of New Mexico Press, August 2021)

Gary Jackson’s second collection delves deep into family history, hopping back and forth across time and geography to tell the stories of Jackson’s Korean maternal grandmother, Dukie, and his mother, Kimberly. Sprinkling personal vignettes with missives in Dukie’s voice and erasures created from interviews with Kimberly, Jackson meditates on what it means to navigate among identities—Blackness and Asianness, Americanness and Koreanness—across continents, and through intersecting diasporas in search of belonging. We thoroughly enjoyed this powerful new collection and hope you’ll check it out as well.

Monica Mody, Ordinary Annals (above/ground, August 2021)

Contributor (and past staff writer) Monica Mody’s newest chapbook, written over the course of the last year, reflects on the tumultuous events of 2020 and 2021 as the poet herself contended with the US’s notoriously thorny visa system. In her signature resonant and deeply grounded poetic style, Mody examines the limits of the body in all its many senses—as creative work, as organism, as site of protest, as political subject, as resident (of community, of nation, of habitat, of ecosystem, of Earth)—resulting in a prescient work that, in the poet’s own words, “falter(s) towards a ripple, a ground of healing.” A beautiful artifact of these difficult times, this lovely little handmade chap is not one to miss.

Rajiv Mohabir, Cutlish (Four Way, September 2021)

It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Rajiv Mohabir’s lush, melodic poetry. (We’ve published him three times, after all!) Cutlish is his third full-length collection, out this month from Four Way Books. Built around a semi-invented, musically inspired form that Mohabir calls a “chutney poem” after the work of Sundar Popo (considered the father of Caribbean Chutney music), Cutlish sets out to investigate the interstices of language and diaspora, postcolonial and queer identities. Patrick Rosal writes that, in its pages, “Mohabir leads us enthusiastically to the edges of language—torn, improvised, as well as deftly carved—where music and meaning are visually and sonically sumptuous.” If you’ve enjoyed the pieces of Mohabir’s that we’ve published in the past, you’ll definitely want to pick up a copy of this book.

Mai Der Vang, Yellow Rain (Graywolf, September 2021)

We were lucky enough to publish Mai Der Vang’s work back in Issue 3, and we were incredibly excited to hear about her second book’s entry into the world this fall. Vang’s first collection, Afterland, won the Walt Whitman Award, and she’s now followed it up with Yellow Rain, which bears witness to the harm inflicted upon the Hmong people in Laos in the 70s and 80s by the chemical known as “yellow rain.” Using collaged language drawn from historical documents, Vang’s newest book promises to be just as searingly powerful as her first. Booklist has awarded it a starred review, and Kao Kalia Yang describes it as a “an indictment of the highest and most poetic order.” We can’t wait to dig into this one when it’s released later this month!

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MORE NEW & NOTEWORTHY TITLES:

Paolo Javier, O.B.B. (Nightboat, September 2021)

Sandra Lim, The Curious Thing (Norton, September 2021)

Shin Yu Pai, Virga (Empty Bowl, August 2021)

Patrick Rosal, The Last Thing: New & Selected Poems (Persea, September 2021)

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What new Asian American poetry titles are on your radar this season? We’d love to hear from you! Share your recommendations with us in the comments or on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram (@LanternReview).

ALSO RECOMMENDED:

Cover image of PLAYLIST FOR THE APOCALYPSE by Rita Dove

Playlist for the Apocalypse by Rita Dove
(Norton, 2021)

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.

An April APA Poetry Companion: New Books for National Poetry Month

Header Image: An APA Poetry Companion, April 2020 (Victoria Chang, OBIT; Jenifer Sang Eun Park, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A HORSE; mai c. doan, WATER/TONGUE, George Abraham, BIRTHRIGHT; Marianne Chan, ALL HEATHENS; Dorothy Chan, REVENGE OF THE ASIAN WOMAN; Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, THE EXPERIMENT OF THE TROPICS; Diruba Ahmed, BRING DOWN THE ANGELS)
More New and Notable APA Poetry Reads for April 2020

Last week, we featured an excerpt from Arhm Choi Wild’s debut collection, Cut to Bloom, here on the blog. But Wild’s book is far from the only new collection by an APA poet being released this April; this National Poetry Month has bestowed us with quite the embarrassment of riches. Below are just a few of the exciting new titles that are on our radar this month.

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FEATURED PICKS

Victoria Chang, Obit (Copper Canyon)

Written in a span of two weeks after the death of the poet’s mother, this collection (Chang’s fifth) takes obituary as poetic form. It looks to be an intensely powerful read, and it’s on the top of this editor’s list to check out next.

Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, The Experiment of the Tropics (Gaudy Boy)

Ypil’s The Experiment of the Tropics co-won the 2019 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize and is up for both a Believer Book Award and a Lambda Award this year. This collection finds the poet digging into archival history using photographs and documentary poetics to examine the colonization of the Philippines. His experimentation with form and text looks to be especially exciting—definitely a title to check out!

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ALSO NEW AND NOTEWORTHY

George Abraham, Birthright (Button Poetry)

Dilruba Ahmed, Bring Down the Angels (U of Pittsburgh)

Dorothy Chan, Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions)

Marianne Chan, All Heathens (Sarabande)

mai c. doan, water/tongue (Omnidawn)

Jenifer Sang Eun Park, Autobiography of Horse: A Poem (Gaudy Boy)

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

A March APA Poetry Companion: Books to Keep You Company at Home

Header Image: An APA Poetry Companion, March 2020 (Monica Sok, A NAIL THE EVENING HANGS ON; Michelle Penaloza, FORMER POSSESSIONS OF THE SPANISH EMPIRE; Elieen R. Tabios, PAGPAG; Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, A TREATISE ON STARS; Eric Tran, THE GUTTER SPREAD GUIDE TO PRAYER; Rick Barot, THE GALLEONS, Kimiko Hahn, FOREIGN BODIES, Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, A BRIEF HISTORY OF FRUIT)
New and Notable APA Poetry Reads in March 2020

These are strange and heavy times we’re living in. As many of us find the physical confines of our daily worlds suddenly reduced to the square footage of our homes, books—more than ever—can help us to feel connected to the outside world. Whether you’re restless, in need of solace, or simply lonely for another voice, here are some new and recent books by APA poets to keep you company.

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OUR TOP PICKS THIS MONTH:

Michelle Peñaloza, Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire (Inlandia, 2019)

Though LR contributor Michelle Peñaloza’s Hillary Gravendyk Prize–winning debut collection came out last August, it’s been on this editor’s reading list for what seems like forever. I was a big fan of Peñaloza’s 2015 chapbook landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias 2015), with its powerful, geographically grounded vignettes and close attention to imagistic texture, and Former Possessions seems to promise a similar deep engagement with the complex layers of trauma and history with respect to narratives of place and migration.

Monica Sok, A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon, 2020)

Sok masterfully weaves together the skeins of narratives left fragmented by the legacy of war, trauma, and diaspora with a skillful hand, moving fluidly between past and present; Cambodia and Pennsylvania. Together, the poems in this debut collection comprise a whole cloth that is by turns tender and unflinching—not unlike the beautiful length of strong yellow silk (handwoven by the author’s grandmother) whose image wraps the cover of the book itself.

Eileen R. Tabios, PAGPAG: The Dictator’s Aftermath in the Diaspora (Paloma, 2020)

Yes, PAGPAG is fiction, not poetry, but it’s by LR contributor and APA literary great Eileen R. Tabios—we’d be amiss not to feature it! Hot off the presses (it was released barely a fortnight ago), this collection of short stories is not one to miss.

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ALSO NOTEWORTHY AND NEW:

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, A Brief History of Fruit (U of Akron, 2020)

Rick Barot, The Galleons (Milkweed, 2020)

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, A Treatise on Stars (New Directions, 2020)

Kimiko Hahn, Foreign Bodies (W. W. Norton, 2020)

Eric Tran, The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer (Autumn House, 2020)

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What new and notable books have been keeping you company this month? Share your recommendations with us in the comments or on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram (@LanternReview).

Three Diverse Poetry Anthologies to Teach This School Year

3 Diverse Poetry Anthologies to Teach This School Year: Cover Images of HALAL IF YOU HEAR ME (Ed. Fatimah Asghar and Safia Elhillo), INK KNOWS NO BORDERS: POEMS OF THE IMMIGRANT AND REFUGEE EXPERIENCE (Ed. Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond), OF COLOR: POETS' WAYS OF MAKING, AN ANTHOLOGY OF ESSAYS ON TRANSFORMATIVE POETICS (Ed. Amanda Galvan Huynh and Luisa A Igloria, Editors).
L to R: HALAL IF YOU HEAR ME (Ed. Asghar & Elhillo), INK KNOWS NO BORDERS (Ed. Vecchione & Raymond), OF COLOR (Ed. Huynh & Igloria)

A new school year is upon us, and if you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll know that we’re passionate about diverse books in the classroom. Anthologies are wonderful resources for teachers hoping to integrate a range of poetic voices into a curriculum, and luckily, 2019 has been especially bountiful in terms of new poetry anthologies and edited collections that feature diverse voices. Read on for three such titles that have caught our eye this year—and that we think would make fantastic additions to any classroom in the 2019–2020 academic year.

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Halal If You Hear Me
(Haymarket Books, 2019)
Edited by Fatimah Asghar and Safia Elhillo

In assembling Halal If You Hear Me, editors Safia Elhillo and Fatimah Asghar set out to create a space that celebrates the diversity of the Muslim community. In her introduction, Elhillo writes of growing up afraid of “performing my identity incorrectly.” Asghar, too, writes of her own longing for acceptance. In contrast to shame and alienation, the editors have envisioned Halal If You Hear Me as a space of solidarity and freedom—a testament to the notion that, in Elhillo’s words, “there are as many ways to be Muslim as there are Muslims.” It’s safe to say that the editors have roundly succeeded: from Kazim Ali to Warsan Shire, the broad variety of poetic styles and backgrounds represented in Halal If You Year Me span a truly impressive range, singing and grooving across genres and generations. Halal If You Hear Me would make a fantastic choice for a high-school or community teaching setting, where its broad accessibility would make it an inviting point of entry into poetry. College-level and graduate courses, too, would benefit from the inclusion of this vibrant volume in their syllabuses.

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Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience
(Triangle Square, 2019)
Edited by Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond

In a time where the notions of borders, migration, and citizenship are under constant scrutiny, Ink Knows No Borders seeks to highlight and celebrate the diversity that immigrant and refugee voices bring to the table. Write editors Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond in their introduction, “These lived stories, fire-bright and coal-hot acts of truth telling, are the poet’s birthright—and a human right. [ . . . ] Not only does ink know no borders; neither does the heart.” Indeed, this anthology sings with colorful narratives that bear witness. Featuring more than sixty poems that engage an enormous range of communities and experiences, the volume combines beloved favorites like Li-Young Lee’s “Hymn to Childhood” with more recent works like Aimee Nezhukhumatathil’s “On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance” and features a star-studded list of contributors that includes many of my [Iris’s] own favorite poets to teach—Joseph O. Legaspi, Franny Choi, Ocean Vuong, Alberto Ríos, Juan Felipe Hererra, Ada Limón, Bao Phi, and more. Ink Knows No Borders would be a wonderful text to teach in any high school or community setting or as an addition to any undergrad- or graduate-level reading list, while individual poems from the volume could also shine in the middle-grade classroom. To get you started, Penguin Random House, which distributes the book, has even helpfully provided a teacher’s guide to aid with introducing selected poems from the book to young readers.

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Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making
(The Operating System, 2019)
Edited by Amanda Galvan Huynh and Luisa A. Igloria

Born out of a student-teacher collaboration, this landmark volume thoughtfully collects together craft essays by poets of color—including numerous APA voices such as Ching-In Chen, Sasha Pimental, Ocean Vuong, and Craig Santos Perez. In keeping with the “windows and mirrors” principle, which proposes that students need to read texts that both offer glimpses into others’ experiences and reflect their own, Of Color tackles the need for diversity among not just primary works, but also among secondary writings on poetics, theory, and craft. In her introduction, coeditor Luisa A. Igloria recalls how the project came into being after a meeting when Amanda Galvan Huynh (who was then her student) confessed her frustration that “there was nothing in [her craft and theory courses’] syllabi or course reading lists that reflected who she was back to herself” (19). Indeed, the resultant volume speaks to a desire to carve out and create not just a resource—but a community. Writes Huynh in her own introduction, “To BIPOC writers: I hope you find what you need to hear in these pages, the support, the love, the struggle, and the reassurance that you are not alone in this poetic artistry” (16). A beautiful testament to the strength and importance of community, Of Color would be a strong addition to any undergraduate or graduate creative writing syllabus.

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What books that you encountered in school helped open your world to diverse voices? If you’re an educator, what texts have you loved for including racially diverse perspectives in your curriculum? Share your recommendations with us in the comments or on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram (@LanternReview).

Four Fresh and Forthcoming APA Poetry Collections to Enjoy This Fall

Four Forthcoming APA Poetry Collections for Fall 2018; Cover images of A CRUELTY SPECIAL TO OUR SPECIES, ISAKO ISAKO, THE ONLY COUNTRY WAS THE COLOR OF MY SKIN, YOU DARLING THING
Clockwise from top left: A CRUELTY SPECIAL TO OUR SPECIES, ISAKO ISAKO, THE ONLY COUNTRY WAS THE COLOR OF MY SKIN, YOU DARLING THING

As summer comes to a close, we wanted to alert you to a number of exciting collections by Asian American poets that are forthcoming this fall. These poems are both luminous vessels of time travel and crucial artifacts of our milieu. They are guides that point out the boundaries between worlds and identities and—with a sleight of hand—expose a hidden latch, revealing unseen horizons. We hope these poets’ offerings of sight, memory, and sound will help to sustain you this autumn. May they inspire you to continued resistance and resilience.

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A Cruelty Special to Our Species by Emily Jungmin Yoon (HarperCollins, Sept 2018)

Emily Jungmin Yoon’s collection is a persistent and lucid study of sexual violence, colonization, and war. Over and over, Yoon deploys language, documents its destruction. She returns to mourn; she collects the remains. At the heart of her project is “Testimony,” a section that gathers the stories of Korean women who survived Japanese occupation. In another sequence, “An Ordinary Misfortune,” the speaker asks, “How could I put a child in a haunted place.” This question resounds throughout the pages of her collection, relentless, resilient, and shapeshifting as Yoon’s lyric “I.”

You Darling Thing by Monica Ferrell (Four Way Books, Oct 2018)

Sardonic and erotic, Monica Ferrell’s second collection reads like a tête-à-tête gone rogue. Given voice, brides and beloveds come alive, unbraiding their limbs from Flaubert, Duchamp, and Tolstoy. Once stripped bare, now decked in furs, the women of Ferrell’s poems stalk and stomp, recognizing the bridegroom’s cry for what it is: “a lost boat’s foghorn bleating.” You Darling Thing arranges the savage dance of courtship, only to split the social contract of marriage: “A woman alone is a cave of violets, / A man alone a squirming rat, who squeaks.”

The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin by Kathleen Hellen (Saddle Road Press, Oct 2018)

The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin knits poetry with prose, Tokyo with Manzanar. Probing an elusive Japanese American identity and reaching deep into traditional Japanese poetic forms, past LR contributor Hellen writes boldly, “I have a mouth to tell my story.” The result is a hybrid collection that acts as star chart for the present and enacts a communion with the past.

Isako Isako by Mia Ayumi Malhotra (Alice James Books, Sept 2018)

We’re beside ourselves with excitement for our very own founding editor Mia Ayumi Malhotra, whose first collection just hit shelves yesterday! Inspired by the stories of Malhotra’s own grandmother and great-grandmother, Isako Isako grapples with Japanese incarceration and American occupation, as well as mass displacement and transnational migration. Four generations of women reach across lost decades and burning cities, and they convene in the poems to brush palms, slip tissues, and share war rations. When her speaker calls out, “Isako Isako are you leaving me. How much longer Isako will you remember me,” Malhotra sets forth a yearning that knows no bounds—after all, as the poems remind us, survival is nothing without remembrance.

The Bindery in San Francisco will be hosting a launch event for Isako Isako this evening, September 5, where the author will be joined by Jennifer S. Cheng (author of Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems) as well as experimental improv drummer Paul Sakai. If you’re local to the Bay Area, we hope you’ll consider coming out to celebrate our Mia with us!

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In this season of harvest, what collections are on your reading list? Which poets and what images do you find yourself returning to? Share them with us in the comments or let us know on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram (@LanternReview).

APIA Poetry Collections to Carry with You into 2017

The covers of NIGHT SKY WITH EXIT WOUNDS, POWER MADE US SWOON, OVERPOUR, and LOOK
Clockwise from top left: NIGHT SKY WITH EXIT WOUNDS, POWER MADE US SWOON, OVERPOUR, LOOK

Happy New Year! It’s hard to believe that 2017 is already here. In the past, we’ve made an annual tradition of listing some of our favorite reads of the year before the holidays begin. But this season, as we find ourselves staring down the barrel of a year that promises to hold significant changes for our nation with a mixture of apprehension and resolve, we’ve decided to do things a little differently. And so, rather than a list of holiday reading recommendations, here are a few books by some of LR’s friends and past contributors that inspired us in 2016 and that we hope will inspire you to take heart, to speak up, to fight harder, and to dream and make art with even greater passion in the coming year.

Power Made Us Swoon by Brynn Saito (Red Hen Press, 2016)

We are so proud to have published an excerpt of the manuscript that eventually became this collection in our sixth issue. In Power Made Us Swoon, Saito uses persona to probe family legacies of trauma, immersing herself in the history of Japanese American internment during WW II. Saito’s speaker is transitory, transcendent in the resolve that propels her to continually return to the artifacts of memory, and to inhabit sites and stories in search of narrative, lyric, image. In a time when more than one public figure has attempted to erase the trauma of internment in service of grotesquely racist and xenophobic rhetoric, this powerful collection seems prescient indeed.

Look by Solmaz Sharif (Graywolf Press, 2016)

A finalist for the National Book Award, Sharif’s Look captures the anxieties of our time, illuminating the frightful spectre of language mutated in the mouth of war. The collection recasts terms from the Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms to perform a kind of documentary acrobatics that shows how language and experience are imbricated in times of war. “I am attempting my own // mythmaking,” Sharif says, in an elegant, urgent argument about how the private and public, the immigrant and emigrant, and the civilian and military are realities that cast shadows, chiaroscuro-like, on each other.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)

One of the first poets whose work we published, Ocean Vuong has a distinctly masterful voice that sings and flits through this finely-tuned collection. At once delicately intimate and intensely raw, Night Sky with Exit Wounds powerfully stitches together—no, choreographs—feathered fragments of memory and the legacies of war and displacement onto a document of the speaker’s coming-of-age journey, a rich odyssey of survival and self-discovery as seen through the lens of language and text. In the context of the troubling conversations about refugees that have swirled to fever pitch of late, Vuong’s singular voice rises to bear poignant, timely witness.

Overpour by Jane Wong (Action Books, 2016)

“I’m that person who can’t stop looking,” Wong writes, and indeed, hers is the writing of an eye—or an “I”—that is attuned and attentive, a poetry startled into mystery, one into which perception floods, impressions overlaid and juxtaposed to encapsulate everything from the cosmic to the kitchen. The language in Overpour is filled with riddles and slips, steeped in undergrowth, and inhabited by mushrooms, carnations, and sweaters. The poems are songs, tasting the strangeness of language, its slippages and shifts in meaning, and embedded music.

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Of course, there are so many others that we could list—starting with the books and chapbooks that we featured on the blog in 2016. Janine Joseph’s Driving Without a License seems especially prescient right now in the context of the fraught conversations about immigration happening in our country, while Sun Yung Shin’s voice in Unbearable Splendor provides critical witness for the Asian American adoptee community in the wake of the unjust deportation of Adam Crapser. Meanwhile, Timothy Yu’s 100 Chinese Silences, Jai Arun Ravine’s The Romance of Siam: A Pocket Guide, and Pat Rosal’s Brooklyn Antediluvian model unique modes of resistance, writing back in satire and song. Nor are they alone in doing so among the titles that we have written about this year. Here is the full list:

Unbearable Splendor by Sun Yung Shin (Coffee House Press, 2016) [Read an excerpt on the LR blog here.]

The Romance of Siam: A Pocket Guide by Jai Arun Ravine (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2016) [Read our interview with Ravine about the collection here.]

Brooklyn Antediluvian by Patrick Rosal (Persea Books, 2016) [Read our most recent interview with Rosal here.]

The Taxidermist’s Cut by Rajiv Mohabir (Four Way Books, 2016) [Read our summer feature on this collection here.]

Map of an Onion by Kenji C. Liu (Inlandia Books, 2016) [Read our summer feature on this collection here.]

Driving without a License by Janine Joseph (Alice James Books, 2016) [Read our interview with Joseph here.]

The Dead in Daylight by Melody Gee (Cooper Dillon, 2016) [Read our summer feature on this collection here.]

The Ruined Elegance by Fiona Sze-Lorrain (Princeton U Press, 2016) [Read our summer feature on this collection here.]

100 Chinese Silences by Timothy Yu (Les Figures Press, 2016) [Read our interview with Yu here.]

Kissing the Sphinx (Two of Cups Press, 2016) and Set the Garden on Fire (Porkbelly Press, 2015) by Chen Chen [Read our dual interview with Chen and Margaret Rhee here.]

Radio Heart (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and Yellow (Tinfish Press, 2011) by Margaret Rhee [Read our dual interview with Rhee and Chen Chen here.]

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We hope that 2017 is a year filled with brighter things for our community, despite all apparent expectation—glimmers of illumination in the midst of struggle, moments of delight that surprise us in the thick of the ever-present work. As you labor on, may these books, and the many others like them (c.f. also Bryan Thao Worra’s extensive roundup of books by API poets published in 2016, and Hyphen magazine’s 2016 poetry favorites), be touchstones to you. Return to them when the work feels weary; keep their words and images pressed to your skin like small talismans kept in a coat pocket, warm and smooth to the touch. May language serve you well this year, and may your own words in turn be infused with strength and truth and beauty, lantern-glow against the ever-quickening dark as we stride into the months ahead.

Peace and light,

Iris & Mia