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Books : Literature & Fiction : World Literature : United States : Poetry : Asian American
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From Ha Jin, the widely-acclaimed, award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash, comes a novel that takes his fiction to a new setting: 1990s America. We follow the Wu family--father Nan, mother Pingping, and son Taotao--as they fully sever their ties with China in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and begin a new, free life in the United States.
At first, their future seems well-assured--Nan’s graduate work in political science at Brandeis University would guarantee him a teaching position in China--but after the fallout from Tiananmen, Nan’s disillusionment turns him towards his first love, poetry. Leaving his studies, he takes on a variety of menial jobs while Pingping works for a wealthy widow as a cook and housekeeper. As Nan struggles to adapt to a new language and culture, his love of poetry and literature sustains him through difficult, lean years.
Ha Jin creates a moving, realistic, but always hopeful narrative as Nan moves from Boston to New York to Atlanta, ever in search of financial stability and success, even in a culture that sometimes feels oppressive and hostile. As Pingping and Taotao slowly adjust to American life, Nan still feels a strange, paradoxical attachment to his homeland, though he violently disagrees with Communist policy. And severing all ties--including his love for a woman who rejected him in his youth--proves to be more difficult than he could have ever imagined.
Ha Jin’s prodigious talents are evident in this powerful new book, which brilliantly brings to life the struggles and successes that characterize the contemporary immigrant experience. With its lyrical prose and confident grace, A Free Life is a luminous addition to the works of one of the preeminent writers in America today.
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“Sassy, tough-girl humor. . . . [Brenda] Shaughnessy’s voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip . . . consistently wry, and ever savvy.”—Harvard Review
“Brenda Shaughnessy . . . writes like the love-child of Mina Loy and Frank O’Hara.”—Exquisite Corpse
In her second book, winner of the prestigious James Laughlin Award, Brenda Shaughnessy taps into themes that have inspired era after era of poets. Love. Sex. Pain. The heavens. The loss of time. The weird miracle of perception. Part confessional, part New York School, and part just plain lover of the English language, Shaughnessy distills the big questions into sharp rhythms and alluring lyrics. “You’re a tool, moon. / Now, noon. There’s a hero.”
Master of diverse dictions, she dwells here on quirky words, mouthfuls of consonance and assonance—anodyne, astrolabe, alizarin—then catches her readers up short with a string of powerful monosyllables. “I’ll take / a year of that. Just give it back to me.” In addition to its verbal play, Human Dark With Sugar demonstrates the poet’s ease in a variety of genres, from “Three Sorries” (in which the speaker concludes, “I’m not sorry. Not sorry at all”), to a sequence of prose poems on a lover’s body, to the discussion of a disturbing dream. In this caffeine jolt of a book, Shaughnessy confirms her status as a poet of intoxicating lines, pointed, poignant comments on love, and compelling abstract images —not the least of which is human dark with sugar.
Brenda Shaughnessy was raised in California and is an MFA graduate of Columbia University. She is the poetry editor for Tin House and has taught at several colleges, including Eugene Lang College and Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn.
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In Book of My Nights, Li-Young Lee once again gives us lyrical poetry that fuses memory, family, culture and history. In language as simple and powerful as the human muscle, these poems work individually and as a full- sequence meditation on the vulnerability of humanity. Now one of the world's most-acclaimed young poets, Mr. Lee has received numerous honors and awards. His poems have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
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Writing and Enjoying Haiku shows how haiku can bring a centered, calming atmosphere into one's life, by focusing on the outer realities of life instead of the naggings of the inner mind, by gaining a new appreciation for the world of nature, and by preserving moments, days, and events so that they are not lost forever in the passage of time. Haiku are clearly shown to be a means of discovering and recording the miracles of the world, from the humorous to the tragic. This is one of the major themes underlying Writing and Enjoying Haiku-that haiku can provide a way to a better life.
After looking at why the reading and writing of haiku is important from a spiritual point of view, the book shows, as has never been done before, the techniques of writing-the when and the where, punctuation and capitalization, choice of words, figures of speech, sharing haiku, and much, much more.
Having come this far, having learned to read and write haiku with a discerning mind, the reader will never again look upon the world in quite the same way.
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For decades adolescents have turned to poetry to give voice to the raw emotion that characterises those tender years. In recent years, though, the form has lost its sheen as Generation X has bled into Generation Y and poets have grown up, losing touch with their rebellious past as epitomized by Arthur Rimbaud and Allen Ginsburg. But the ounders of Ad Astra books and Rich Balling, the editor of REVOLUTION ON CANVAS Volume 1, have set out to reclaim verse for today's youth, and in doing so, discovered an eager and untapped market. A market whose musical tastes lie somewhere between Britney Spears and garage bands. In other words, most teenagers and early 20-somethings today. The poetry in REVOLUTION ranges from the hysterically funny to the achingly sad, and everything in between, and is written by today's finest up-and-coming bands.
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There is a skeleton on display in the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Connecticut. It has been in the town for over 200 years. Over time, the bones became the subject of stories and speculation in Waterbury. In 1996 a group of community-based volunteers, working in collaboration with the museum staff, discovered that the bones were those of a slave named Fortune who had been owned by a local doctor. After Fortune's death, the doctor dissected the body, rendered the bones, and assembled the skeleton. A great deal is still not known about Fortune, but it is known that he was baptized, was married, and had four children. He died at about the age of 60, sometime after 1797. Marilyn Nelson was commissioned by the Mattatuck Museum and received a grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts to write a poem in commemoration of Fortune's life. The Manumission Requiem is that poem. Detailed notes and archival materials provide contextual information to enhance the reader's appreciation of the poem.
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Familiar to listeners of National Public Radio, David Budbill is beloved by legions for straightforward poems dispatched from his hermitage on Judevine Mountain. Inspired by classical Chinese hermit poets, he follows tradition but cannot escape the complications and struggles of a modern solitary existence. Loneliness, aging and political outrage are addressed in poems that value honesty and simplicity and deplore pretension.
For more than three decades, David Budbill has lived on a remote mountain in northern Vermont writing poems, reading Chinese classics, tending to his garden and, of course, working on his website. Budbill has been featured more than any other author on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac.
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Based on the vastly popular Oxford Companion to English Literature edited by Margaret Drabble, this indispensable volume offers over five thousand alphabetically arranged entries on individual novels, plays, songs, poems, novelists, poets, playwrights, essayists, philosophers, historians, fictional characters, literary movements, legends, and much more.
Like its parent volume, this abridgement features useful plot summaries, entries on important fictional characters, and countless biographical articles on authors and other influential figures in the world of letters, all presented with the same lightness of touch that has made the original work such a pleasure to read. Fully revised and updated, the third edition features dozens of new entries on writers ranging from literary giant Marcel Proust, to American writers Michael Cunningham, Harper Lee, and Cormac McCarthy, to rising British stars Monica Ali, Hari Kunzru, and Zadie Smith. Readers will now find concise, reliable accounts of postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard, literary critic Terry Eagleton, science fiction writer Douglas Adams, fantasy writer Philip Pullman, Jamaican poet Jean "Binta" Breeze, playwright Michael Poliakoff, and children's author J.K. Rowling. In addition, the edition includes updated appendices listing the winners of the Nobel, Booker, and Pulitzer prizes. There is also a new timeline, chronicling the development of literature from its origins right up to the present day.
With generous coverage of literature from around the world, entries on literary movements, critics, and critical theories, and updated information on modern authors and works, this is a book that readers will find indispensable. Written by a team of more than 140 distinguished contributors, headed by Margaret Drabble, it belongs on the shelves of all lovers of literature.
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I was born in a small city near the East Sea,when the Great Cultural Revolution began.
My name is Little Green,
my country Zhong Guo, the Middle Kingdom.
When I was ten years old,
our leader had died and the revolution ended.
And this is how I remember it.
When Chun Yu was born in a small city in China, she was born into a country in revolution. The streets were filled with roaming Red Guards, the walls were covered with slogans, and reeducation meetings were held in all workplaces. Every family faced danger and humiliation, even the youngest children.
Shortly after Chun's birth, her beloved father was sent to a peasant village in the countryside to be reeducated in the ways of Chairman Mao. Chun and her brother stayed behind with their mother, who taught in a country middle school where Mao's Little Red Book was a part of every child's education. Chun Yu's young life was witness to a country in turmoil, struggle, and revolution -- the only life she knew.
This first-person memoir of a child's view of the Chinese Cultural Revolution is a stunning account of a country in crisis and a testimony to the spirit of the individual -- no matter how young or how innocent.
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“Barot’s Want is dexterous and thrilling, and his capacious and generous vision shows us how the eye survives ‘to correct the heart.’”—Michael Collier
“In Rick Barot’s hands every poem casts at least two luminous shadows. Want is masterfully merciless and merciful at the same time.”—Terrance Hayes
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VOL. IGREECE
484 B.C.--200 A.D.
VOL. II
ROME
234 B.C.--180 A.D.
VOL. III
GREAT BRITAIN AND
IRELAND--I
1281-1745
VOL. IV
GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND--II
1672-1800
VOL. V
GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND--III
1740--1881
619 pages.
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For David H. Rosen and Joel Weishaus, haiku represents a healing union of intuition and sensation, past and present, self and other, ordinary and extraordinary, and current and ancient memories. In this simple, compelling book, the authors, who have lived and traveled extensively in Japan, offer 172 haikus that resonate with Zen Buddhist, Shinto, and Taoist insights. Underscoring the philosophy "moments, moments, that is life," the book takes readers beyond the ego into a healing realm of simple, archetypal words. This book is a haibun of psyche, an exchange of poetry and prose between two old friends who set out to accomplish a soulful journey together.
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Some 120 haiku by such masters as Basho, Issa, and Buson—all written on themes of people of various shapes and sizes, young and old—are combined with the woodblock prints and paintings of the great artists of classical Japan. The poems appear both in skillful English translation, as well as in the original Japanese.
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From the author of the well-received Good Luck Gold and Other Poems comes this new collection of perceptive, touching, often amusing poems.
With a sense of pride in her Korean, Chinese, and American background, Janet Wong's poetry reflects some of the differences between Chinese and Korean customs and culture and the American way of life. Divided into three sections -- Korean, Chinese, and American -- and with the author's own explanation as to how the poems developed from experiences in her own life, these poems speak directly and simply to young people of many ethnic backgrounds, providing insights into the different kinds of prejudice that many children confront today. Here is "Poetry":
"What you study in school?" my grandfather asks./ "Poetry," I say, climbing high to pick a large ripe lemon off the top limb./ "Po-tree," he says. "It got fruit?"
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Mitsuye Yamada was born in Kyushu, Japan, and raised in Seattle, Washington, until the outbreak of World War II when her family was removed to a concentration camp in Idaho. Camp Notes and Other Writings recounts his experience.Yamada's poetry yields a terse blend of emotions and imagery. Her twist of words creates a twist of vision that make her poetry come alive. The weight of her cultural experience-the pain of being perceived as an outsider all her life-permeates her work.
Yamada's strength as a poet stems from the fact that she has managed to integrate both individual and collective aspects of her background, giving her poems a double impact. Her strong portrayal of individual and collective life experience stands out as a distinct thread in the fabric of contemporary literature by women.
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The debut collection from a vibrant, streetwise voice: Winner of the 2002 Members' Choice Award from the Asian American Writers Workshop.
Patrick Rosal's poetry rings with the music of no-frills industrial towns of central New Jersey. Portraits of hip-hoppers and condemned men (whose misdeeds as boys forever shaped their futures) alternate with dynamic riffs on longing—sexual and filial—and on the poet's Filipino roots. Unpredictable and breathtaking as a sax solo, these poems are the indelible marks made by a world that has been simultaneously kept close and left behind.
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A perceptive, lyrical novel about a Chinese American girl seeking a new vision of herself
Readers will instantly relate to the heady, messy experience of being a teenager in this poignant novel in free verse, which Publishers Weekly called “highly visual and eloquently wrought” and Kirkus called “finely crafted.” Emily, a Chinese American teen, is determined to reinvent herself outside the mold in which her family and friends have always viewed her. Her interest in a sexy new student propels her to try out different versions of herself. In the end her art may provide the key to understanding who she is.
An International Reading Association Notable Book
A New York Public Library Best Book for the Teen Age