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PEOPLE ARE TINY IN PAINTINGS OF CHINA

People are Tiny in Paintings of China
by Cynthia Arrieu-King
Octopus Books, 2010
Recommended by Iris:
“I lost my father in late 2010, and the delicate—almost brittle—transparency of this collection (which has much to do with fathers and familial heritage) struck me to the bone.  Arrieu-King’s language is beautifully evocative, but economical; her poems are rendered with slim, decisive strokes that are as breathtaking for their clear-eyed, precise minimalism as they are for their wry, sharply observant (at times downright blunt) commentary.  Acts of mathematical counting, division (or inability to divide, as in the case of the poem titled “Prime Numbers”), and serial repetition are motifs in the collection, as are colors, lenses or frames of vision, the contours of landscapes and language. Taken together, these themes serve to magnify and illuminate the speaker’s gaze as she negotiates what it means to claim a multiracial, transnational identity in a world that irrationally desires, even demands, perfectly divisible, concrete forms.”

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ARDENCY

Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels
by Kevin Young
Alfred A. Knopf, 2011
Recommended by Mia:
“Kevin Young’s latest book, Ardency, is at once epic and lyric, documentary and wholly imaginative.  Written from the perspective of various figures involved in the Amistad rebellion of 1839, the three sections of this book, ‘Buzzard,’ ‘Correspondence,’ and ‘Witness: A Libretto’ unfold in a dramatic reimagining of this moment in history.  While it’s true that with this collection, Young ‘[places] himself squarely in the African American poetic tradition pioneered by such writers as Langston Hughes’ (as the Washington Post claims on the book jacket), he also uses it to reinvent the tradition.”

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THE ANATOMY THEATER

The Anatomy Theater
by Nadine Sabra Meyer
Harper Collins, 2005
Recommended by Mia:
“Nadine Sabra Meyer won the 2005 National Poetry Series Award with this collection, and I can’t recommend it more highly.  The poems draw deeply from history and mythology, studies of the human figure—its dissections, assemblages—and the tradition of the body in medicine and art.  Her work is riveting, beautifully crafted, and a must-read for anyone interested in, as John Koethe puts it, the human body and its relationship to the transcendent.  Luckily, Harper Collins lets you browse the contents of the book on their website, so you can preview a selection of the poems online.”

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CHEERS TO MUSES

Cheers to Muses: Contemporary Works by Asian American Women
Asian American Women Artists Association, 2008
Recommended by Kelsay:
“Cheers to Muses is a truly inspired and inspiring anthology featuring visual art, poetry, fiction and nonfiction by Asian American women who challenge contemporary and historical assumptions about what it means to create Asian American art in all of its forms. Barbara Jane Reyes, Kathy Aoki, Keiko Nelson, Nellie Wong, Katherine Westerhout, Genny Lim, Catherine Ceniza Choy and many others share pieces of work and tributes to the Asian American women who have influenced their creative lives. Aside from being visually appealing, it offers a taste of how Asian American women approach the contemporary art scene.”

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APOCALYPTIC SWING

Apocalyptic Swing
by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Persea, 2009
Recommended by Henry:
“This was recommended to me by someone who’s completing a dissertation on boxing and Modernism. I’ve boxed and had a hard time writing about it, and have never come across any literature about the sport/art that isn’t mere glory or gossip. But this book of poems is ‘it.’ Brutal, beautiful, sincere. It’s the one that blew me away this year.”

* * *

bough breaks

Bough Breaks
by Tamiko Beyer
Meritage Press, 2011
Recommended by Jai:
“I am excited by this book’s inquiry into and desire for queer conception and how it imagines what queer mothering would look like.”

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For yet more evocative reading, we also recommend any of the following titles, which we have reviewed or featured in the last year:

Poetry

• Mouth by Lisa Chen (reviewed in this post by Henry)
• Travel & Risk by Monica Mody (featured in this post)
• Spit by Esther Lee (featured in this post by Henry)
• แล้ว and then  entwine by Jai Arun Ravine (featured in this post)
• Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man by Ronaldo V. Wilson (reviewed by Stephen Hong Sohn in this post)
• Poems of the Black Object by Ronaldo V. Wilson (reviewed by Stephen Hong Sohn in this post)
• Toxic Flora by Kimiko Hahn (winner of the 2011 Asian American Literary Award in Poetry; mentioned here; also see Wendy’s interview with Kimiko Hahn)
• Requiem for the Orchard by Oliver de la Paz (1st finalist for the 2011 Asian American Literary Award in Poetry; mentioned here and reviewed by Supriya in 2010)
• We Take Me Apart by Molly Gaudry (2nd finalist for the 2011 Asian American Literary Award in Poetry; mentioned here)
• The Propaganda Factory, or Speaking of Trees by Marc Vincenz (featured in this post)
• Ligature Strain by Kim Koga (reviewed in this post by Jai)
• Yellow/Yellow by Margaret Rhee (reviewed in this post by Jai)
• Sông I Sing by Bao Phi (reviewed in this post by Greg Choy)
• not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them by Jenny Boully (reviewed in this post by Jai)

Prose, Mixed Genre, & Comic Art

• Kartika Review: 2009-2010 Anthology (featured in this post)
  
• Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology (reviewed in this post by Henry)
• How Do I Begin? A Hmong American Literary Anthology  (edited by HWAC, whom we profiled in Issue 3; featured in this post)
• Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian (featured in this post by Henry)

What is the best book that you have read in 2011, or what books are you planning to read (or give) over the holidays?  Let us know in the comments!

* * *

Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 | Timothy Yu | Stanford University Press (2009)

Recommended by Mia: “This is one of the key critical texts on my reading list for the holidays.  I’ve only skimmed the first few chapters, but thus far have found Yu’s argument compelling, his analysis rigorous, and his wide-ranging knowledge of Asian American and Language poetry in the United States to be informative to my own work—not to mention useful in historicizing these two movements/moments in contemporary poetry!

From the Tinfish Editors’ Blog: ‘Using a definition of the avant-garde that has less to do with aesthetics than with social groups composed of like-minded artists, Yu argues that Asian American poetry and Language writing formed parallel movements in the 1970s. [...] Both presented themselves in opposition to the mainstream; both were marked by questions of form and racial identity. Both meant to create art out of social groups, and reconstitute the social through the reception of their art.’”

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Radiant Silhouette: New & Selected Work 1974-1988 | John Yau | Black Sparrow Press (1989)

Recommended by Mia: “Yau is one of the two major poets that Timothy Yu addresses in Race and the Avant-Garde (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is the other), so I’ve been reading through his New & Selected Work for an introduction to the thematic and aesthetic scope of his early career.  He’s a fascinating figure in Asian American poetry and, as Yu points out, ‘might best be read as a restoration of the links between politics, form, and race that characterize the avant-garde Asian American poetry of the 1970s [... providing] the first opportunity for most readers to recognize [...] the presence of that avant-garde back into the very origins of Asian American writing.’”

* * *

Man on Extremely Small Island | Jason Koo | C&R Press (2009)

Recommended by Iris: “Jason Koo’s style is very different from my own, but this book (his first collection) managed to completely charm me with its quirkiness.  The voice of the book’s primary speaker manifests a world-weary exhaustion that is, on the surface, darkly melancholic and painfully self-deprecating.  He obsesses over his dirty apartment while eating a tuna sandwich, dreams about floundering clumsily through an encounter with Lucy Liu, envisions himself stranded on an island in the middle of an ocean, worrying about the size of his nose.  But beneath the speaker’s (at times endearingly hyperbolic) self-consciousness lies a striking vulnerability and a luminous ability to evoke the fantastic within the mundane: BBQ chip crumbs echo the ‘fine grains / of my slovenliness,’ becoming ‘barbecue pollen,’ and later, ‘orange microbes’ (9); Lucy Liu becomes a motherly goddess figure who guides him through a secret mission, ‘pulling you after her diving into the stage,’ which becomes the arena for an undersea showdown complete with battleships, lingerie models, and harpoons (22) , the island transforms into the kneecap of a giant woman who ‘has no nose. Just a space where mine / can fit’ (77). Part Frank O’Hara, part tragic hero of his own sardonic comic-book series, the speaker’s sense of humor, whimsy, and wonder, as transmitted by Koo’s craft, paint a picture of a world that reinvisions the now-archetypal image behind John Donne’s famous ‘No man is an island’ with simultaneous irreverence and tenderness. ”

* * *

Beasts for the Chase | Monica Ferrell | Sarabande Books (2008)

Recommended by Iris: “Possibly one of the most beautiful collections that I have read this year.  Along with the beautifully strange and grotesque figurations of the body that occur in Kimiko Hahn’s The Artist’s Daughter, Ferrell’s gorgeously ornate (but never stiff) renderings of mythological and literary figures have caused me to look more closely at my own craft, to think more minutely and intensely about the intricacies of shape, texture, and fluid—the body as shapeshifting tableau, rendered intricately and forcefully (even animalistically, at times) on the page.”

* * *

The Elephant’s Journey | José Saramago (Trans. Margaret Jull Costa) | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2010)

Recommended by Monica: “This is the first Saramago book I’ve read and I hope you, like me, find and read everything you can by him. The Elephant’s Journey is apparently a work of historical fiction but it also lives in the interstices of other genres such as fable, socio-political commentary, philosophy, and gentle comedy. An Indian elephant, gifted to the king of Portugal by Goa, is re-gifted to the archduke of Austria. How he makes his journey across 16th c. Europe with his mahout is basically the plot, and there’s not much to it. It is Saramago’s narrative strategies, such as the artifice of orality, defocalization, polyvocality, and digressions, that give the book its force.”

* * *

The Road to Wanting | Wendy Law-Yone | Chatto & Windus (2010)

Recommended by Simone: “It begins with a suicide and a comedy of errors, wrought with the dark humor leftover in ordinary people’s minds in a former British colony. Although the town of Wanting and the Wild Lu tribe which feed this novel’s plot are the author’s inventions, Burma (her birthplace) and its complex human dramas are very real. The principle character, Na Ga, illuminates the stark reality of what Nobel Laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi once referred to as a ‘Fascist Disneyland.’ Na Ga’s story gives voice to the country’s ethnic minorities and reveals a more intricate portrait of Burma through her own longing, displacement and growth. Throughout her tumultuous journey, Na Ga seeks to discover what–and where–’home’ truly is.”

* * *

Break Every Rule: Essays on Language, Longing, and Moments of Desire | Carole Maso | Counterpoint (2000)

Recommended by Kelsay: “I find Maso’s short collection of essays to be incredibly inspiring for the lyric artist in any genre. In this book, she elevates the act of writing about writing to poetry because she’s not afraid to interrogate the task of a lyricist, especially a lyrical writer of prose, while making love to language itself in each essay.”

* * *

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation | Jeff Chang | Picador (2005)

Recommended by Kelsay: “When asked what basic idea he wanted readers to walk away with this past November in a lecture on Can’t Stop Won’t Stop at Saint Mary’s College of California, Jeff Chang said: ‘That hip-hop is a worldview.’ Even more than a history of the music that made his generation, his book is a story of generations, political ideologies, history, culture and the worldview of the people participating in the grassroots movement over the past thirty years.  ”

* * *

And don’t forget the following books—all of which we’ve reviewed and/or featured in the last year—either:

Poetry

• Water the Moon by Fiona Sze-Lorrain (reviewed in this post by Supriya Misra)
• Insides She Swallowed by Sasha Pimental Chacón (reviewed in this post by Supriya Misra)
• from unincorporated territory [hacha] and from unincorporated territory [saina] by Craig Santos Perez (as featured in this interview with him)
• Why is the Edge Always Windy? by M0ng-Lan (as featured in this guest post by Stephen H. Sohn and this interview with her)
• In the Mynah Bird’s Own Words by Barbara Tran (as featured in this guest post about Tupelo, by Stephen H. Sohn)
• Ardor by Karen An-hwei Lee (as featured in this guest post about Tupelo, by Stephen H. Sohn)
• At the Drive-In Volcano and Miracle Fruit by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (as featured in this guest post about Tupelo, by Stephen H. Sohn)
• Ignatz by Monica Youn (reviewed in this post by Supriya Misra)
• Requiem for the Orchard by Oliver de la Paz (reviewed in this post by Supriya Misra)
• Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (featured over the course of two months: part 1 and part 2)
• Each Crumbling House by Melody Gee (reviewed in this post by Henry W. Leung)
• The Half-Inch Himalayas by Agha Shahid Ali (as featured in this post by Mrigaa Sethi)
• 100 Poems by S S Prasad (reviewed in this post by Monica Mody)
• Adamantine by Shin Yu Pai (reviewed in this guest post by Stephen H. Sohn)
• The Mental Life of Cities by Eddie Tay (reviewed in this post by Henry W. Leung)
• Diwata by Barbara Jane Reyes (reviewed in this post by Monica Mody)
• Burnings by Ocean Vuong (reviewed in this post by Kevin Minh Allen)

Prose

• I Love You’s Are For White People by Lac Su (reviewed in this post by Ly Chheng)
• I-Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita (reviewed in this post by Ly Chheng

* * *

Please help support the work of small presses and Asian American writers this season.  What’s on your holiday reading or gift list this year? Leave us a note in the comments to share your favorite titles from 2010.

Asylum | Quan Barry | University of Pittsburgh Press (2001)

Recommended by Mia: “My holiday reading pick . . . it’s her first collection.  Her engagement with the voices and subjects of the Vietnam War is beautifully executed, and though the scope of her work is much broader, I was most riveted by her ‘war’ poems.”

* * *

Behind My Eyes | Li-Young Lee | W.W. Norton & Company (2008)

Recommended by Iris: “This is Lee’s most recent collection — and it is stunning, as always.  Figurations of the Virgin Mary intertwine with moving landscapes, conversations between the poet and his wife, the transitory spaces of travel, a chance vision of the poet’s father; all hang in a delicate, almost sacred, lumen, suspended somewhere between heaven and earth.  Each poem breathes with an expansiveness and a grave tenderness that only Lee knows how to render. Behind My Eyes is sold with a CD of the poet reading some the poems in the book, and I highly recommend listening to this, as well.  I had the privilege of hearing Lee read from his drafts for this book a few years before it came out, and loved the way that the intonation of his voice seamed through the lines of each poem, threading them together in a low, sonorous hum.  It’s a beautiful listening experience, and adds a new and lovely textural dimension to his already melodious poetics.”

* * *

Call Me Ishmael Tonight | Agha Shahid Ali | W.W. Norton & Company (2003)

Recommended by Supriya: “This collection of ghazals shows the versatile ways in which a poetic form can go beyond its history and language while staying true to its essence. Agha Shahid Ali demonstrates the intentionality with which he overcomes expectations and boundaries by using a traditional form that often evokes feelings of longing and melancholia but writing in a contemporary English that feels timeless. Although written entirely in form, the range and depth of this collection allows for a vast expanse of emotions and possibilities and is the perfect collection with which to curl up whatever your mood.”

* * *

A Gesture Life | Chang-rae Lee | Penguin USA (2000)

Recommended by Ada: “Told from the point of view of Dr. Hata, a Japanese WWII veteran, this fictional memoir weaves between his experiences in a crumbling outpost of a Japanese imperial outpost in the last days of the war and his later life in gated, suburban America. The protagonist in Lee’s second novel is so reasonable it’s eerie, and though I think that we are meant to feel sorry for Dr. Hata and the stiffly respectable, appropriately understated life he has bound himself into, the distance that separates him from all the other characters in this book translates into distance from the reader. Not that the whole book left me cold: the scenes describing Dr. Hata’s encounters with Korean comfort women during the war are eye-opening, gripping, and an interesting perspective on the terrors of war.”

* * *

We also highly recommend any of the titles that we’ve featured in our posts to date.  Some notables:

• The Heart’s Traffic (Ching-In Chen; Arktoi Press 2009)
  [as featured in Supriya Misra's review]
• Juan Luna’s Revolver (Luisa Iglora; UND Press 2008)
  [as featured in our interview with Luisa Igloria]
• Imago (Joseph Legaspi; CavanKerry Press 2007)
  [as featured in Ada Yee's interview with Joseph Legaspi]
• Look We Have Coming to Dover! (Daljit Nagra, Faber & Faber 2007)
  [as featured in Mrigaa Sethi's critique of the poem "Darling and Me!"]
• Half-Lit Houses (Tina Chang; Four Way Books 2004)
  [as featured in Stephen Sohn's post about Four Way]
• Sediment (Sandy Tseng; Four Way Books 2009)
  [as  featured in Stephen Sohn's post about Four Way]
• World Ball Notebook (Sesshu Foster; City Lights 2009)
  [as featured in this post, and in our post about the 2009 Asian American Literary Awards]
• Beasts for the Chase (Monica Ferrell; Sarabande Books 2008)
  [as featured in our post about the 2009 Asian American Literary Awards]
• An Aquarium (Jeffrey Yang; Graywolf  Press 2008)
  [as featured in our post about the 2009 Asian American Literary Awards]

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Please help support poets and the presses that publish them by considering picking up one or two of these titles as something to keep you occupied on that long plane ride, as a gift for a literature-loving friend, or simply as a winter afternoon treat.  What else is on your reading list for the holidays?  Comment and let us know!