"The poems in Commons are at once global and intensely personal and emotional. An immensely talented poet, Myung Mi Kim loves language - its internal rhymes, alliterations, and diverse rhythms. Caught off guard by the beauty and precision of Kim's language and the exquisite images she so deftly conjures, we are drawn unwittingly into a web of fragmentary memories that subvert what we think we know about the violent history that haunts her and never ceases to demand recognition."--Elaine Kim, author of Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context, and co-editor of Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism
In Penury, Myung Mi Kim probes sanctioned norms of cognition by breaking communication into its most discrete components. With these irruptions and suspensions, she writes into extremes of forced loss, violence, and impoverishment. Exposing latent relations in sound and sense, Kim proposes how new ethical awareness can be encountered where the word and its meaning/s are formed. Here, language is not offered as transparent communication of ideas, but as testament to and disruption of oppressive dominant concepts and cultural practices. Penury means poverty, but in this text's radical relation to lack, we hear the most elemental and active forms of change.
Poetry. In UNDER FLAG, winner of the 1991 Multicultural Publishers Book Award, Myung Mi Kim writes in a stark, unflinching voice that alternately drives to the core of painful subject matter and backs off to let beauty speak for itself: "Save the water from rinsing rice for sleek hair / This is what the young women are told, then they're told / Cut off this hair that cedar combs combed / Empty straw sacks and hide under them / Enemy soldiers are approaching..." The cumulative effect is, according to Ammiel Alcalay, a poetics which resists being neutralized or categorized. "Myung Mi Kim's languange is pure and commanding and brings us to a place of grieving we have needed to acknowledge"-Kathleen Fraser. Third Printing.
A companion volume to the Classical Korean Poetry, this anthology provides the reader a bird's eye view of modern, 20th century Korean poetry, thus completing the sampling of the Korean poetry beginning with the 12th century through the present.
Winner of the 2022 PEN Open Book Award! Winner of the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award! Finalist for the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Awards in Poetry! Curb maps our post-9/11 political landscape by locating the wounds of domestic terrorism at unacknowledged sites of racial and religious conflict across cities and suburbs of the United States. Divya Victor documents how immigrants and Americans navigate the liminal sites of everyday living: lawns, curbs, and sidewalks, undergirded by violence but also constantly repaved with new possibilities of belonging. Curb witnesses immigrant survival, familial bonds, and interracial parenting in the context of nationalist and white-supremacist violence against South Asians. The book refutes the binary of the model minority and the monstrous, dark "other" by reclaiming the throbbing, many-tongued, vermillion heart of kith.
Asian American literature dates back to the close of the 19th century, and during the years following World War II it significantly expanded in volume and diversity. Monumental in scope, this encyclopedia surveys Asian American literature from its origins through 2007. Included are more than 270 alphabetically arranged entries on writers, major works, significant historical events, and important terms and concepts. Thus the encyclopedia gives special attention to the historical, social, cultural, and legal contexts surrounding Asian American literature and central to the Asian American experience. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and cites works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography of essential print and electronic resources. While literature students will value this encyclopedia as a guide to writings by Asian Americans, the encyclopedia also supports the social studies curriculum by helping students use literature to learn about Asian American history and culture, as it pertains to writers from a host of Asian ethnic and cultural backgrounds, including Afghans, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, Iranians, Indians, Vietnamese, Hawaiians, and other Asian Pacific Islanders. The encyclopedia supports the literature curriculum by helping students learn more about Asian American literature. In addition, it supports the social studies curriculum by helping students learn about the Asian American historical and cultural experience.
Conceived as one poem, Myung Mi Kim's Dura is a whirling experimental symphony of images, forms and rhythms assembled and juxtaposed to translate the experience and gestures of the Korean immigrant woman surviving in America at the end of the twentieth century. Its language negotiates a past -- "How was it to be the first arrivals in rows and columns" -- as well as a present -- "A perceiver without a state", and has already gained Kim recognition as among the most moving and important "translators" in contemporary poetry.
Poetry. "SWOLE full y'all--of what flotsam language is when time comes to name the wrongs befalling (some of) us. A songbook of catastrophes--these, big as bodies, small as cities--Marchan's reeling debut is the real thing. She washed her lines in Katrina's filthy water till they smeared into gendercrit mondegreens, broad dialects, Yung Crank's crunk-ass barz, and syntax that's at once saturated and eroded. Reckoning the wreckage, she writes: 'after the rain has left my room coldish / ... I light / candles makes me feel / oceanic or just salty'--vast and pissed, deep and caustic, SWOLE near bursts with poetry."--Douglas Kearney "Against the impulse to 'draw lines as a kind of forgetting,' Jerika Marchan's SWOLE comes 'a-knockin' just in the nick of time. In the tradition that includes the work of C.D. Wright, Myung Mi Kim and NourbeSe Philip, this is a book we've been waiting for: the one in which the catastrophe is on-going, beginning again and again in the speaker who is also a listener, who brings together (in a dialogic dance mix), a history of responsive, hopeful and hopeless, gestures, moving us deep into the embodied, simultaneous time of the aftermath in which what happened goes on overflowing whatever walls were put in place to hold it back. The famous formulation about time ('you can't step in the same river twice') is undone here: the poet makes it clear that to be human is to be humid, and that (as the waters keep rising), we don't get to get out of the river. Built 'to accommodate the flood,' Jericka Marchan's first book is a conduit to the wide-open living we all need to do: dive in, swallow, swell. "--Laura Mullen "How does one survive a disaster of such magnitude that it uproots a culture, a history, a life? Jerika Marchan's SWOLE helicopters over the breached levee and breakwater, as roofs rip and fly like paper over her home city, in the midst of Hurricane Katrina. This is not a past. It is a present of immense proportion, and Marchan's lyric gift lifts us right into the eye of the storm. This is poetry of unimaginable strength and deliverance."--D. A. Powell "Jerika Marchan's SWOLE is both chronicle and canticle of Katrina: choral and various, silty and loamy, light-throated and dark-hued. Her multivocal rendering recalls Kamau Brathwaite's Tempest-driven 'video style'; like Brathwaite, she spins a shipwrecked archive of a historical catastrophe threaded with so many other submerged (yet rising) voices. A textured and haunting debut."--Joyelle McSweeney
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