Staff Picks
Inscrutable, Beautiful: Collections from AAPI Poets
Collection
Celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month with these thought-provoking poetry collections written by AAPI poets.
Living Nations, Living Words
An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry
Published in 2021
"A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today. Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. With work from Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, Layli Long Soldier, among others, Living Nations, Living Words showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, 'poetry [that] emerges from the soul of a community, the heart and lands of the people. In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than 500 living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.'"-- Provided by publisher.
City of Rivers
Published in 2012
Original poems from an author who is shaped by both Bangladeshi and American culture.
Dread
Published in 2003
In Praise of Fragments
Published in 2020
"In Praise of Fragments is a collection of various and inter-related works, including a sequence of poems written about Venetian Jewish poet Sarra Copia Sulam (1592-1641), lyric essays about Venice, a suite of poems about Hyderabad, where Alexander lived for some years, and a series of brief sketches of memoir about her childhood in Kerala, the subject of her groundbreaking memoir Fault Lines. The writings are accompanied by a series of sumi ink drawings by Alexander and an afterword by Leah Souffrant."-- Provided by publisher
Sukun
New and Selected Poems
Published in 2023
"A selection of verse and prose poems published in earlier books along with previously unpublished new poems"-- Provided by publisher.
If They Come for Us
Poems
Published in 2018
From a co-creator of the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls comes an imaginative, soulful debut poetry that collection captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America. Orphaned as a child, Fatimah Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. These poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while also exploring the many facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests itself in our relationships. In experimental forms and language both lyrical and raw, Asghar seamlessly braids together marginalized people's histories with her own understanding of identity, place, and belonging--Publisher's description.
Hello, the Roses
Published in 2013
A poet of "epic perception" and "subtle music," Mei-mei Berssenbrugge opens form into long, shimmering lines of profound emotional intensity and multivalent voices, splintered with space, silence, and desert light. Her new collection of poems, Hello, the Roses, is composed of three parts. The opening poems delve into an array of unities, of myth and landscape, fashion and culture, experience and forgetting, boys and ravens. The central poems explore an invisible world where plants, animals, and the self communicate and coexist. The final part contemplates the individual's relationship to night, weather, and cosmological time as Berssenbrugge limns a karmic temporal continuum, a mandala of perception. Throughout are the roses, transforming slowly, almost imperceptibly, deepening awareness, creating fields: a rosette of civilization -- a wild rose, a Delphic rose, imagined roses, white cabbage roses, an Apache rose, a Bourbon rose, our sacred mortality "saturated with being" in pink petals and gray-green leaves. Hello, the Roses is poetry enraptured with the phenomenal fullness of the world.
English As a Second Language and Other Poems
Published in 2023
Warm tenderness and fiery critique sit side-by-side in Bolina's English as A Second Language, a collection that skewers, laments, and celebrates America with intelligence, humility, and a disarming sense of humor. In Jaswinder Bolina's English as A Second Language and Other Poems, we are asked to imagine the tender and harsh realities of this world within a single breath-- a Steiff monkey resting next to a child in a crib and the tired hands of "a thousand /women in Sidi Bouzid" assembling the stuffed animal. Coated in an armor of wit and humor and steeped in the idiosyncrasies of language, English as a Second Language pits sentimentality against cynicism and the personal against the national. What remains is the kaleidoscopic image of the modern American condition. From elegy to persona, wide-ranging poems tell the story of a child of immigrants becoming a parent against the tumultuous backdrop of our politics and culture. Where the collection asks, "What chance do any of us have?," the poet finds hope, possibility. Bolina's musical poems zip across time, challenging the fixity of the book. Clues offer the possibility of an alternate reading, where backwards, a new emotional arc appears--dreamlike, the nostalgic origin story of a sleep-deprived parent tracing a path through language and history. Forwards, backwards, English as a Second Language skewers, laments, and celebrates America with intelligence and humility. -- Provided by publisher.
Obit
Poems
Published in 2020
"After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. In Obit, Chang writes of "the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking." These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died ("civility," "language," "the future," "Mother's blue dress") and the cultural impact of death on the living. Whereas elegy attempts to immortalize the dead, an obituary expresses loss, and the love for the dead becomes a conduit for self-expression. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living"-- Provided by publisher.
The Trees Witness Everything
Published in 2022
"A collection of poems by Victoria Chang"-- Provided by publisher.
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities
Published in 2017
"In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family -- the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes -- all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, this collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one's own path in identity, life, and love. When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. To be a season of laughter when my father says his coworker is like that, he can tell because the guy wears pink socks, see, you don't, so you can't, you can't be one of them. To be the one my parents raised me to be. A season from the stormiest planet. A very good feeling with a man. Every feeling, in pink shoes. Every step, hot pink."-- Provided by publisher.
Hard Love Province
Poems
Published in 2014
Chin's fourth volume of poems, Hard Love Province, is composed of erotic elegies in which the speaker grieves for the loss of her beloved. In "Void" she writes with the imagistic, distilled quietude of a solitary mourner: "It s not that you are rare / Nor are you extraordinary // O lone wren sobbing on the bodhi tree / You are simple and sincere." In "Formosan Elegy," by contrast, she is that mourner, beyond simplicity or quietude, crying out for a lover: "I sing for you but my tears have dried in my gullet / Walk the old dog give the budgies a cool bath / Cut a tender melon let it bleed into memory." Here, too, are poems inspired by Chin s poetic forbearers and mentors Dickinson, Plath, Ai, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tu Fu, Adrienne Rich, and others honoring their work and descrying the global injustice they addressed. "Whose life is it anyway?" she asks in a poem for Rich, "She born of chrysalis and shit / Or she born of woman and pain?" Emotionally nuanced and electric with high-flying verbal experimentation, image after image, line by line, Chin's spectacular reinventions, her quatrains, sonnets, allegories, and elegies, are unforgettable. --publisher marketing.
The Symmetry of Fish
Published in 2022
"From National Poetry Series winner Su Cho, chosen by Paige Lewis, a debut poetry collection about immigration, memory, and a family's lexicon. Language and lore are at the core of The Symmetry of Fish, a moving debut about coming-of-age in the middle of nowhere. With striking and tender insight, it seeks to give voice to those who have been denied their stories, and examines the way phrases and narratives are passed down through immigrant families-not diluted over time, but distilled into potency over generations. In this way, a family's language is not lost but continuously remade, hitched to new associations, and capable of blooming anew, with the power to cut across space and time to unearth buried memories. The poems in The Symmetry of Fish insist that language is first and foremost a bodily act; even if our minds can't recall a word or a definition, if we trust our mouths, expression will find us-though never quite in the forms we expect"-- Provided by publisher.
The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes on
Published in 2022
"Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples. With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time--from Korean comfort women during World War II, to the precipice of climate crisis, to children wandering a museum in the future. They explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. Wrestling with the griefs and distances of this apocalyptic world, Choi also imagines what togetherness--between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest--could look like. Bringing together Choi's signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On ultimately charts new paths toward hope""--Front dust jacket flap.
A God at the Door
Published in 2021
"In an era of pandemic lockdown and brutal politics, Tishani Doshi's poems make vital space for what must come next-the return of wonder and free movement, and a profound sense of connection to what matters most. From a microscopic cell to flightless birds, to a sumo wrestler and the tree of life, Doshi interrupts the news cycle to pause in grief or delight, to restore power to language. A God at the Door invites the reader on a pilgrimage-one that leads us back to the sacred temple of ourselves. This isan exquisite, generous collection from a poet at the peak of her powers"-- Provided by publisher.
Loves You
Poems
Published in 2019
"In Loves You, Sarah Gambito explores the recipe as poetic form and a mode of resistance. Through the inclusion of real recipes that she and her family cook from, she brings readers to the table, not only to enjoy the bounty of her poems but, slyly, to consider the ways in which Filipino Americans, and people of color in general, are assailed and fetishized. In addition, the book explores the manifold ways that poetry can nourish and provide for us"-- Provided by publisher.
Tree Spirits Grass Spirits
Published in 2023
"A collected series of intertwined poetic essays written by acclaimed Japanese poet Hiromi Ito―part nature writing, part travelogue, part existential philosophy. Written between April 2012 and November 2013, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits adopts a non-linear narrative flow that mimics the growth of plants, and can be read as a companion piece to Ito's beloved poem "Wild Grass on the Riverbank". Rather than the vertiginously violent poetics of the latter, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits serves as what we might call a phyto-autobiography: a recounting of one's life through the logic of flora. Ito's graciously potent and philosophical prose examines immigration, language, gender, care work, and death, all through her close (indeed, at times obsessive) attention to plant life."-- Provided by Amazon.
OBB A.k.a The Original Brown Boy
Published in 2021
A Distant Center
Published in 2018
"A Distant Center moves award-winning fiction writer Ha Jin's astounding poetic talent into the spotlight. Originally inscribed in Chinese and rendered into English by Ha Jin, these poems operate between cultures, languages, and poetic traditions. The result is a generous hybrid space in which vast territory is explored adventurously: exile and immigration, personal memories and current crisis. This poetry confronts China's fraught political history while recalling and embodying its timeless culture and landscape. The poet is plainspoken and insightful, addressing the turmoil of displacement with meditative wisdom, self-reflection, and playfulness. Ha Jin has arrived at the height of his powers as a poet; his is a brilliant mind wrestling gracefully with the pain of an uprooted life"--Back cover.
Asterism
Published in 2024
"Selected by John Murillo as the winner of the Dorset Prize, Asterism contemplates the wonders and challenges of polycentric living, ultimately interrogating capitalist enactments of fixed and exclusive belonging. Migrating between S. Korea, Peru, and the U.S., the poet finds luminous homes at the interstices of bridges, flight layovers, languages, desires, imperfect memories, and mutable mouths. Lee blurs the line between self and other as words translated into connotations meet on the page with portraits of co-inhabited identities, histories, and tender relationships. Throughout, each line longingly, bravely unfurls towards strangeness and beauty of her own making"-- Provided by publisher.
The Invention of the Darling
Poems
Published in 2024
"Acclaimed poet Li-Young Lee offers a revelatory volume of ecstatic poems that search out divine voices in the silences of life, love, and death"-- Provided by publisher.
Isako Isako
Published in 2018
"Isako Isako follows a single family lineage spanning four generations of female Japanese Americans to explore the chilling historical legacies of cultural trauma--internment, mass displacement and rampant racism--in the United States, and how it weaves together with current events"--Amazon.
Oculus
Poems
Published in 2019
"In Oculus, Sally Wen Mao explores exile not just as a matter of distance and displacement but as a migration through time and a reckoning with technology ... A fascinating sequence spanning the collection speaks in the voice of the international icon and first Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong, who travels through the history of cinema with a time machine, even past her death and into the future of film, where she finds she has no progeny. With a speculative imagination and a sharpened wit, Mao powerfully confronts the paradoxes of seeing and being seen, the intimacies made possible and ruined by the screen, and the many roles and representations that women of color are made to endure in order to survive a culture that seeks to consume them."-- Amazon.com.
The Taxidermist's Cut
Published in 2016
The Taxidermist's Cut is a collection that centers the pressures of being a queer brown youth awakening sexually in a racist, anti-immigrant matrix. As an Indo-Caribbean, the queer-countried speaker is illegible as an Indian as well as an American. Haunted by his migration narrative, the speaker tries to make himself fit into his environment by sloughing off his skin and stretching new ones over his body. At stake here is surviving a palimpsest of violence: violences enacted upon the speaker and violences the speaker enacts upon himself through cutting. Mohabir engages with the body and the land as a series of incisions and overlays to cover the damage of memory of a South Asian brown body dealing with aggressions and joys. This is a collection of twisted love stories-as-slits that exposes the meat and bone of trauma and relief. Drawing from outside source texts such as animal tracking guides and taxidermy manuals, these poems attempt to show the process of how to survive being erased on all fronts.
Not Here
Published in 2018
"Not Here is a flight plan for escape and a map for navigating home; a queer Vietnamese American body in confrontation with whiteness, trauma, family, and nostalgia; and a big beating heart of a book. Nguyen's poems ache with loneliness and desire and the giddy terrors of allowing yourself to hope for love, and revel in moments of connection achieved"--Amazon.com
A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure
Published in 2021
"A new collection of poetry by Hoa Nguyen"-- Provided by publisher.
Constellation Route
Published in 2022
"Constellation Route uses the form of the letter to explore issues related to contemporary American society: the environment, race, love, grief, friendship, violence, and spirituality. The book is largely a metaphysical tribute to both the Post Office and the act of letter writing as a way to understand and create meaningful connections with the world at large. A collection of mostly epistolary poems and odd poems about post offices"-- Provided by publisher.
Two Brown Dots
Poems
Published in 2022
"Selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Danni Quintos carves a space for brown girls and weird girls in her debut collection of poems. Two Brown Dots explores what it means to be a racially ambiguous, multiethnic, Asian American woman growing up in Kentucky. In stark, honest poems, Quintos recounts the messiness and confusion of being a typical '90s kid--watching Dirty Dancing at sleepovers, borrowing eye shadow out of a friend's caboodle, crushing on a boy wearing khaki shorts to Sunday mass--while navigating the microagressions of the neighbor kids, the awkwardness of puberty, and the casual cruelties of fellow teenagers. The mixed-race daughter of a dark skinned Filipino immigrant, Quintos retells family stories and Phillipine folklore to try and make sense of an identity with roots on opposite sides of the globe. With clear-eyed candor and a wry sense of humor, Quintos teases the line between tokenism and representation, between assimilation and belonging, offering a potent antidote to the assumption that "American" means "white." Encompassing a whole journey from girlhood to motherhood, Two Brown Dots subverts stereotypes to reclaim agency and pride in the realness and rawness and unprettyness of a brown girl's body, boldly declaring: We exist, we belong, we are from here, and we will continue to be." -- Provided by publisher.
West
A Translation
Published in 2023
"A collection of poetry by Paisley Rekdal"-- Provided by publisher.
Ask the Brindled
Poems
Published in 2022
"Ask the Brindled, selected by Rick Barot as a winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series, bares everything that breaks between 'seed' and 'summit' of a life-the body, a people, their language. It is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians-and it does not let readers look away"-- Provided by publisher.
Heard-hoard
Published in 2021
"Recognized by the Whiting Awards for his 'wildly original' poetry and his "uncanny and unparalleled ability to blend lyric and narrative," Atsuro Riley extends and deepens his uncommon mastery here. In Heard-Hoard, Riley has 'razor-exacted' and 'raw-wired' this absorbing new sequence of poems, a vivid weavework rendering and remembering an American place and its people. At once an album of tales , a portrait gallery, an "inscritched" dirt-mural, and a hymnbook, Heard-Hoard encompasses a chorus of voices, shot through with their (mostly human) histories and their mysteries. From the crackling story-man calling us together in the primal circle to Tammy figuring "time and time that yonder oak," Atsuro Riley's new collection is a profound evocation of lives and lore, "a lit meat-mesh of heards." In an early blurb, Linda Gregerson writes, "The category of the 'mythic' has been much cheapened by overuse, but Heard-Hoard restores the term to its original and originary power. The English language has rarely been so richly augmented in such little space. His first book won Riley an extensive and passionate following. His readers will be thrilled, as I am, by this new collection." Contracts, Rights, and Permissions"-- Provided by publisher.
The Last Thing
New & Selected Poems
Published in 2021
A momentous collection from the author of <em>Brooklyn Antediluvian</em>, winner of the 2017 Lenore Marshall Prize from Academy of American Poets
Call This Mutiny
Uncollected Poems
Published in 2024
"Call this mutiny is the seventh book from award-winning and internationally-renowned Pacific Islander author Craig Santos Perez. These poems were originally published in journals and anthologies between 2008-2023, but this is the first time they have been collected into a single volume. Throughout, Perez continues his critical exploration of native cultures, decolonial politics, colonial histories, and the entangled ecologies of his homeland of Guam, his current residence of Hawaiʻi, and the larger Pacific region in relation to the Global South and the Indigenous Fourth World. As he reminds us about the power of storytelling: 'If we can write the ocean, we will never be silenced.'"-- Provided by publisher.
Customs
Poems
Published in 2022
"In Customs, Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America. With resignation and austerity, these poems trace a pointed indoctrination to the customs of the nation-state and the English language, and the realities they impose upon the imagination, the paces they put us through. While Sharif critiques the culture of performed social skills and poetry itself--its foreclosures, affects, successes--she begins to write her way out to the other side of acceptability and toward freedom. Customs is a brilliant, excoriating new collection by a poet whose unfolding works are among the groundbreaking literature of our time"-- Provided by publisher.
So Much Synth
Published in 2016
"Shaughnessy's fourth collection as she approaches middle age and revisits the memories, romances, and music of adolescence. So Much Synth is a brave and ferocious collection composed of equal parts femininity, pain, pleasure, and synthesizer. While Shaughnessy tenderly winces at her youthful excesses, we humbly catch glimpses of our own"-- Provided by publisher.
Hydra Medusa
Published in 2023
"A book of poetry, dreams and speculative talks, collected from the psychic detritus of living in the US-Mexico borderlands. Part coping mechanism, part magical act, Hydra Medusa was composed while Brandon Shimoda was working five jobs and raising a child--during bus commutes, before bed, at sunrise. Encountering the ghosts of Japanese American ancestors, friends, children and bodies of water, it asks: what is the desert but a site where people have died, are dying; are buried, unburied, memorialized, erased. Where they are trying, against and within the energy of it all, to contend with our inherited present--and to live."--Amazon.com description
A Nail the Evening Hangs on
Published in 2020
"In her debut collection, Monica Sok uses poetry to reshape a family's memory about the Khmer Rouge regime, memory that is both real and imagined, according to a child of refugees. Driven by myth-making and fables, the poems examine the inheritance of the genocide and the profound struggles of searing grief and PTSD. Though the landscape of Cambodia is always present, it is the liminal space, the in-betweenness of diaspora, in which younger generations must reconcile their history and create new rituals. A Nail the Evening Hangs On seeks to reclaim the Cambodian narrative with tenderness and an imagination that moves towards wholeness and possibility."--Publisher's description.
Peach State
Published in 2021
"Peach State has its origins in Atlanta, Georgia, the author's hometown and an emblematic city of the New South, a name that reflects the American region's invigoration in recent decades by immigration and a spirit of reinvention. Focused mainly on food and cooking, these poems explore the city's transformation from the mid-twentieth century to today, as seen and shaped by Chinese Americans. The poems are set in restaurants, home kitchens, grocery stores, and the houses of friends and neighbors. Often employing forms--sonnet, villanelle, sestina, palindrome, ghazal, rhymed stanzas--they also mirror the constant negotiation with tradition that marks both immigrant and Southern experience"-- Publisher's website.
Sight Lines
Published in 2019
"From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices--from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent--and his mythic imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet, balancing rigor with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry." -- Provided by publisher.
Genghis Chan on Drums
Poems
Published in 2021
"At once comic and cantankerous, tender and discomfiting, piercing and irreverent, Genghis Chan on Drums is a shape-shifting book of percussive poems dealing with aging, identity, PC culture, and stereotypes about being Chinese via a wide range of surprising forms (pantoums and sonnets) and unlikely subjects, including the 1930s Hollywood actress Carole Lombard, the Latin poet Catullus, the fantastical Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo's imaginary sister, and a nameless gumshoe. Seemingly without effort, Yau can go from using the rhyme scheme of an Edmund Spenser sonnet written in the 16th century, to riffing on a well-known poem-rant by the English poet Sean Bonney (1969 - 2019), to limiting himself to the words of condolence sent by a former president to the survivors of a school massacre. Yau's poems are conduits through which many different, conflicting, and even unsavory voices strive to be heard"-- Provided by publisher.
From from
Poems
Published in 2023
A collection of poems reflects the experiences of Asian Americans and the problem of creating an Asian American identity while influenced by Westerners' ideas about Asians.