An Asian American Poetry Companion: Future Titles to Dream Toward

An Asian American Poetry Companion: 2023 Preview. Details of the covers of BIANCA by Eugenia Leigh, LANDLOCK X by Sarah Audsley, FROM FROM by Monica Youn, WEST by Paisley Rekdal, DECADE OF THE BRAIN by Janine Joseph, FROM UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY: AMOT by Craig Santos Perez, BRIDGE OF KNOTS by CE Shue, SYNTHETIC JUNGLE by MICHAEL CHANG, A BEAUTIFUL DECAY by Karan Madhok, FEAST by Ina Carino, THE KINGDOM OF SURFACES by Sally Wen Mao
Forthcoming Books by Asian American Poets (for 2023 and Beyond)

For the past two years, we’ve been bringing you quarterly book roundups through our Asian American Poetry Companion posts. Today, in the series’ final entry, we thought we’d look beyond the current season to give you a glimpse of the literary riches to come in 2023. Today’s list reaches far and wide, encompassing everything from books that are due out next month to titles that don’t yet have a release month or cover image—and even a handful of internationally published collections that are not yet available in the US (but that we hope might come here soon!). We hope this last companion will serve you well in the new year. Thank you for loving—and sharing your enthusiasm for—this series over the years. It’s been a pleasure to curate each quarter, and we’re excited to end on a celebratory note. Here’s to Asian American poetry and to all the many books that our community will be putting into the world next year—and beyond!

NOTABLE BOOKS BY ASIAN AMERICAN POETS TO ANTICIPATE IN 2023

Books are listed first by US release month (if known), and then alphabetically by author. Asterisks denote titles by former Lantern Review contributors and/or staff members. For titles that do not yet have purchase information available online, we’ve linked to the author’s website instead.

Janine Joseph, Decade of the Brain (Alice James, Jan 2023)*

C. E. Shue, Bridge of Knots (Gold Line, Jan 2023)

W. Todd Kaneko, The Dead Wrestler Elegies [New Edition] (New Michigan, Jan/Feb 2023)*

Sarah Audsley, Landlock X (Texas A&M UP, Feb 2023)

Ina Cariño, Feast (Alice James, Mar 2023)*

MICHAEL CHANG, Synthetic Jungle (Curbstone, Mar 2023)*

Eugenia Leigh, Bianca (Four Way, Mar 2023)*

Monica Youn, From From (Graywolf, Mar 2023)

Craig Santos Perez, from unincorporated territory: [åmot] (Omnidawn, Apr 2023)*

Paisley Rekdal, West: A Translation (Copper Canyon, May 2023)

Oliver de la Paz, The Diaspora Sonnets (Liveright, Jul 2023)*

Sally Wen Mao, The Kingdom of Surfaces (Graywolf, Aug 2023)*

Karan Madhok, A Beautiful Decay (Aleph Book Company, released in India in fall 2022—not yet available in the US)*

Shikha Malaviya, In Her Own Voice: Poems of Anandibai Joshee (HarperCollins India, TBA 2023—not yet available in the US)

Monica Mody, Bright Parallel (Copper Coin, TBA 2023—not yet available in the US)*

Preeti Kaur Rajpal, Membery (Tupelo, TBA/late 2023)*

Eileen R. Tabios, Because I Love You, I Became War (Marsh Hawk Press, TBA 2023)*

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What forthcoming books are you excited about reading in the new year? Let us know in the comments or on TwitterFacebook, or Instagram (@lanternreview).


ALSO RECOMMENDED

Cover image of THEN THE WAR by Carl Phillips

Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020 by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022)

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.

Three New APA Poetry Collections to Warm You in the New Year

3 New APA Poetry Collections to Warm You in the New Year. (L to R: Cover images of LOVES YOU by Sarah Gambito (Iron wok full of colorful vegetables moving over a lit flame ring), OCULUS by Sally Wen Mao (Woman with long black hair against a pale blue background, her face and body obscured by a camera and white stargazer lilies), and SCAR AND FLOWER by Lee Herrick (red and white title text overlaid on a photograph of brown eggs nestled into the straw in the corner of a rusty hen house).
L to R: LOVES YOU by Sarah Gambito, OCULUS by Sally Wen Mao, SCAR AND FLOWER by Lee Herrick

Happy New Year! 2019 promises to be another exciting year in the world of APA poetry, and so thought we’d start the year off with a bang—by celebrating three fantastic new books that are the top of our reading list this January. For this month’s roundup, we’ve gathered three collections that explore lineage lost, erased, revived for the poets to come. They are precious works that speak to the interdependencies and support that are central to writing and bearing witness, generation after generation. We hope you’ll enjoy these books as much as we have and that, in savoring them, you’ll be able to engage in your own times of reflection this January—to consider those who came before and those who will come after.

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Oculus by Sally Wen Mao (Graywolf, 2019)

Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus is a jolting lyric study of the white heteropatriachal gazes that have vivisected racialized bodies throughout history. This tradition begins early—Afong Moy, for instance, was the first female immigrant in the US, who was sold to an Orientalist exhibition. In a series of persona poems, Mao envisions Moy aching for home, hollering, and smashing trinkets—small acts of agency even as she is trapped under an exploitative system of tokenism. Then, in “Anna May Wong Makes Cameos,” Mao revives and reimagines the famed Chinese American movie star in movies of the early 2000s, only to illustrate how she would be cut from the scene, crushed underfoot. These poems bring to mind literary scholar Anne Cheng’s Ornamentalism, in which she writes of the defiled body, “Having been made stranger to oneself by unimaginable brutality means that one must reapproach the self as a stranger.” By reencountering the body stripped of self and agency, by reasserting the place of women of color in history, Mao’s poetry stages a form of reencounter that is ultimately protective so that those who follow can be freely generative—to “cross the text out,” to “rewrite this” (10).

Scar and Flower by Lee Herrick (Word Poetry, 2019)

The latest collection from Lee Herrick, Scar and Flower, considers what it means to make room in a brutal system of continuous war, climate disaster, mass shootings, deportations, and suicides. As Herrick builds psychic dwellings for repair, the poems in Scar and Flower bring to mind the etymology of “stanza”—a room, a resting point, a space to breathe. By drawing from familiar words and worlds, Herrick gives dimension to these spiritual spaces: the sky’s numerous stars are a reminder of his heritage as a man “born on the other side / of the world” (46); water reminds us of our “resting state” (23); the body is “a song called birth,” venturing out into the world, seeking out and losing its lyrics (48). Lee’s rhapsodic moments return to inherent contradictions of pain and desire—and guide the reader as these knots are worked out through communion with self, other, and world.

Loves You by Sarah Gambito, (Persea, 2019)

Reading Loves You by Sarah Gambito is like thumbing through a grandmother’s scrawled cooking notes, like setting the table for one’s chosen family. Central to Gambito’s collection are poem-recipes, which gain significance through context—“Watermelon Agua Fresca (For When You Need Me),” for instance, takes the form of a list of instructions but ends as a subtle, loving address: “Serve in ice-filled glasses and know how much I love you” (64). At the same time, cooking, as in the poem “Cento,” can just as easily become absorbed, commodified, and twisted into demands for a domestic worker to “do the food,” followed up by: “You cannot cook Filipino food in the kitchen” (18). Even as Gambito never lets her readers forget that love, too, is labor shaped by the legacies of capitalism, imperialism, and colonization, Loves You is a crucial reminder that cutting up chicken and piping lychee cream can be sacred gestures of abundant love, crucial links to homes an ocean away.

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What poetry collections have you been reading to start out your new year? And what books are you looking forward to in the coming months? Share them with us in the comments or let us know onTwitter, Facebook, or Instagram (@LanternReview).

Editors’ Corner: Books We’re Looking Forward to in 2014 (Part 2)

Books We're Looking Forward to in 2014, Part 2

Today, just in time for the start of the year of the lunar new year, we’re finishing off our two-part roundup of books that we’re looking forward to in 2014.  Last week’s post (part 1) focused on recently published titles, while today’s (part 2) focuses on forthcoming books that are due out later this year.

Note: the books discussed below are divided by category according to whether they are currently available for pre-order, or whether specific details of their release have, as of this posting, yet to be announced. For each category, books are listed alphabetically by author.

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Available for Pre-order

Split by Cathy Linh Che (forthcoming from Alice James Books in April 2014)

Split is the latest winner of the Kundiman Prize (the previous years’ awards having gone to Mezzanines by Matthew Olzmann and Pier by Janine Oshiro). Cathy Linh Che is a poet who writes with clarity and shattering vulnerability. I heard her read from portions of Split, which intertwines histories of personal trauma with the inherited trauma of war and displacement, at last year’s AWP, and watched the crowd be visibly moved as she began to cry on the podium. Che said recently, in a feature on the Blood-Jet Radio Hour’s blog: “at a reading, a young woman called me ‘the crying poet.’ She’d witnessed me bawling my eyes out at not one, but two of my own readings. I was a bit embarrassed by the nickname, but now it is a moniker I am proud of! If a book or reading is moving, I tear up. It is how I determine whether or not a work is good. Does it move me? And after I put down the work, does it endure?” I very much respect this: here is a poet who is willing to own the porousness between her work and herself, who is willing to allow herself to be moved by both the process and the “read” experience of her own writing. I can’t wait to read Split. 

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Turn by Wendy Chin-Tanner (forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in March 2014)

This is a special one for us here at LR. Wendy has been our staff interviewer for the past three seasons (she’s the one who’s been responsible for bringing you the insights of everyone from Garrett Hongo to Don Mee Choi), and we are so very ecstatic that she has a book forthcoming! We first got to know Wendy through her sonically rich, smart, politically-attuned poetry—we published a piece of hers in Issue 3 and enjoyed it so much that we made it the “closer” for the main body of the issue. Since joining the blog staff, she’s been a huge asset to the team, contributing colorful and extremely thoughtful interviews each month.  We were thrilled when we learned that Sibling Rivalry had picked up her book, and are very much looking forward to reading it in a couple of months’ time.

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Continue reading “Editors’ Corner: Books We’re Looking Forward to in 2014 (Part 2)”