{"id":7871,"date":"2019-01-26T06:00:58","date_gmt":"2019-01-26T14:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=7871"},"modified":"2019-01-23T23:36:41","modified_gmt":"2019-01-24T07:36:41","slug":"three-new-apa-poetry-collections-to-warm-you-in-the-new-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/26\/three-new-apa-poetry-collections-to-warm-you-in-the-new-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Three New APA Poetry Collections to Warm You in the New Year"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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L to R: LOVES YOU <\/em>by Sarah Gambito, OCULUS <\/em>by Sally Wen Mao, SCAR AND FLOWER <\/em>by Lee Herrick<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Happy New Year! 2019 promises to be another exciting year in the world of APA poetry, and so thought we\u2019d start the year off with a bang\u2014by celebrating three fantastic new books that are the top of our reading list this January. For this month\u2019s roundup, we\u2019ve 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\u2019ll enjoy these books as much as we have and that, in savoring them, you\u2019ll be able to engage in your own times of reflection this January\u2014to consider those who came before and those who will come after.<\/em>
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Oculus<\/a><\/em> by Sally Wen Mao (Graywolf, 2019)<\/strong>
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Sally Wen Mao\u2019s Oculus<\/em> is a jolting lyric study of the white heteropatriachal<\/g><\/g> gazes that have<\/g> vivisected racialized bodies throughout history. This tradition begins early\u2014Afong Moy, for instance, was the first female immigrant in the US, who was sold to an Orientalist exhibition. In a series of persona poems<\/a>, Mao envisions Moy aching for home, hollering, and smashing trinkets\u2014small acts of agency even as she is trapped under an exploitative system of tokenism. Then, in \u201cAnna May Wong Makes Cameos,\u201d 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\u2019s Ornamentalism,<\/em> in which she writes of the defiled body, \u201cHaving been made stranger to oneself by unimaginable brutality means that one must reapproach the self as a stranger.\u201d By reencountering the body stripped of self and agency, by reasserting the place of women of color in history, Mao\u2019s poetry stages a form of reencounter that is ultimately protective so that those who follow can be freely generative\u2014to \u201ccross the text out,\u201d to \u201crewrite this<\/em>\u201d (10).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scar and Flower<\/a><\/em> by Lee Herrick (Word Poetry, 2019)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The latest collection from Lee Herrick, Scar and Flower<\/em>, 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 <\/em>bring to mind the etymology<\/a> of \u201cstanza\u201d\u2014a room, a resting point, a space to breathe. By drawing from familiar words and worlds, Herrick gives dimension to these spiritual spaces: the sky\u2019s numerous stars are a reminder of his heritage as a man \u201cborn on the other side \/ of the world\u201d (46); water reminds us of our \u201cresting state\u201d (23); the body is \u201ca song called birth,\u201d venturing out into the world, seeking out and losing its lyrics (48). Lee\u2019s rhapsodic moments return to inherent contradictions of pain and desire\u2014and guide the reader as these knots are worked out through communion with self, other, and world<\/g>.
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Loves You<\/a><\/em> by Sarah Gambito, (Persea, 2019)<\/strong>
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Reading Loves You<\/em> by Sarah Gambito is like thumbing through a grandmother\u2019s scrawled cooking notes, like setting the table for one\u2019s chosen family. Central to Gambito\u2019s collection are poem-recipes, which gain significance through context\u2014\u201cWatermelon Agua Fresca (For When You Need Me),\u201d for instance, takes the form of a list of instructions but ends as a subtle, loving address: \u201cServe in ice-filled glasses and know how much I love you\u201d (64). At the same time, cooking, as in the poem \u201cCento,\u201d can just as easily become absorbed, commodified, and twisted into demands for a domestic worker to \u201cdo the food,\u201d followed up by: \u201cYou cannot cook Filipino food in the kitchen\u201d (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<\/em> 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 on<\/em>Twitter<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Facebook<\/em><\/a>, or <\/em>Instagram<\/em><\/a> (@LanternReview).<\/em>
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Happy New Year! 2019 promises to be another exciting year in the world of APA poetry, and so thought we\u2019d start the year off with a bang\u2014by celebrating three fantastic new books that are the top of our reading list this January. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1160],"tags":[634,1205,1203,1025,587,1204],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7871"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7871"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7895,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7871\/revisions\/7895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}