Asian & Pacific Islander Voices in Verse

This definitive collection includes more than 100 poems composed over the last forty years. Thich Nhat Hanh's clarity shines forth in Call Me by My True Names, transforming the pain and difficulty of war and exile into a celebration of awareness and the human spirit.

"The work of Tang Dynasty Classical Chinese poets such as Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei has long been celebrated in both China and internationally, and various English translations and mistranslations of their work played a pivotal but often unacknowledged role in shaping the emergence and evolution of modern Anglophone poetry. In The Lantern and the Night Moths, Chinese Canadian poet-translator Yilin Wang has selected and translated poems by five of China's most innovative modern and contemporary poets: Fei Ming, Qiu Jin, Zhang Qiaohui, Xiao Xi, and Dai Wangshu. Their poetry expands and subverts the long lineage of Classical Chinese poetry that precedes them. Wang's translations are featured alongside the original Chinese texts, and as well as original essays by Wang that reflect on the key themes and stylistic features of modern Sinophone poetry and on the art and craft of poetry translation. Together, these poems and essays chart the development of a myriad of modernist poetry traditions in China that parallel, diverge from, and sometimes intersect with their Anglophone and Western counterparts."-- Provided by publisher. (Recommended by Chanlee Luu, MFA Creative Writing '23)

An iconic figure in the emergence of feminist poetry in South Korea and now internationally renowned, Kim Hyesoon pushes the poetic envelope into the farthest reaches of the lyric universe. In her new collection, Kim depicts the memory of war trauma and the collective grief of parting through what she calls an "I-do-bird-sequence," where "Bird-human is the 'I.'" Her remarkable essay "Bird Rider" explains: "I came to write Phantom Pain Wings after Daddy passed away. I called out for birds endlessly. I wanted to become a translator of bird language. Bird language that flies to places I've never been." What un- folds is an epic sequence of bird ventriloquy exploring the relentless physical and existential struggles against power and gendered violence in "the eternal void of grief" (Victoria Chang, The New York Times Magazine). Through in- tensely rhythmic lines marked by visual puns and words that crash together and then fly away as one, Kim mixes traditional folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, the legacies of Rimbaud and Yi Sang, a film by Agnès Varda, Francis Bacon's portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones, a princess trapped in a hospital, and more. A simultaneity of voices and identities rises and falls, existing and exiting on their delayed wings of pain"-- Provided by publisher. (Recommended by Professor Joe Milan)

Baghdad: The City in Verse captures the essence of life lived in one of the world's enduring metropolises. This unusual anthology offers original translations of 170 Arabic poems from Bedouin, Muslim, Christian, Kurdish, and Jewish poets--most for the first time in English--from Baghdad's founding in the eighth century to the present day.

In Islam, the spiritual and literary influence of Jelaluddin Rumi is so pervasive that the name of the 13th-century Persian Sufi leader is prefaced by the reverential term ``Maulana'' (``our master''). Rumi, notes scholar Peter Lamborn Wilson in his preface to this beguiling addition to the current Rumi vogue in the West, ``can only be compared to such Occidentals as Dante and Shakespeare.'' Nonetheless, translating Rumi's astonishingly vast legacy with accessible accuracy is almost defiantly problematic due to the combined difficulties first of parsing the ancient language in which it was recorded and then of helping Western minds to grasp the manifold nuances of the poet's transcendant vision of the Beloved (i.e., God). But native Iranian Shiva (A Garden Beyond Paradise: The Mystical Poetry of Rumi with Jonathan Star) leaps the cross-cultural chasm with engaging panache. Of the 2000 quatrains amassed in Rumi's Divvan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, Shavi has chosen 252, rendering them simultaneously in the original Persian, in verbatim English transliterations and in faithfully polished translations. The result of this interactive method is a book that provides insight into the art of translating while plumbing the depth of Rumi's inspired passion. Included are a glossary of terms, a reference guide to Persian mysticism and a bibliography. - Publishers Weekly/Amazon

Li Bo (701-762) has long inspired controversy among readers and critics. Known even during his lifetime as the "Banished Immortal," he continues to spark imaginations and challenge passionately held convictions about poetic values. In this lucid and gracefully written volume, Paula Varsano presents the first full-length study of Li Bo in English in half a century and the first extended look at the poet's critical reception. Persuaded that the essence of his poetry lay well beyond the reach of the usual modes of study and description, readers from the ninth to the twentieth century developed a particularly dynamic critical language. Varsano shows how this language, evolving out of the critical concepts of "emptiness" and "substance," answered the need to conceptualize shifting parameters of poetic creativity over hundreds of years. At the same time, she offers an account of Li Bo's entry into the canon and asks how this in turn transformed both the reception of his work and the transmission of his poetic persona. This story of Li Bo's critical reception and canonization is propelled by the malleable and elusive ideal of the "ancient." And so, Varsano devotes the second part of her study to the poems themselves, investigating those poetic manifestations of ancientness that translated into the enduring figure of the Banished Immortal.

How did a girl from the provinces, meant to do nothing more than run the family store, become a bold and daring poet whose life and work helped change the idea of love in modern Japan? Embracing the Firebird is the first book-length study in English of the early life and work of Yosano Akiko (1879-1942), the most famous post-classical woman poet of Japan. It follows Akiko, who was born into a merchant family in the port city of Sakai near Osaka, from earliest childhood to her twenties, charting the slow process of development before the seemingly sudden metamorphosis.Akiko's later poetry has now begun to win long-overdue recognition, but in terms of literary history the impact of Midaregami (Tangled Hair, 1901), her first book, still overshadows everything else she wrote, for it brought individualism to traditional tanka poetry with a tempestuous force and passion found in no other work of the period. Embracing the Firebird traces Akiko's emotional and artistic development up to the publication of this seminal work, which became a classic of modern Japanese poetry and marked the starting point of Akiko's forty-year-long career as a writer. It then examines Tangled Hair itself, the characteristics that make it a unified work of art, and its originality.The study throughout includes Janine Beichman's elegant translations of poems by Yosano Akiko (both those included in Tangled Hair and those not), as well as poems by contemporaries such as Yosano Tekkan, Yamakawa Tomiko, and others.

"Akiko Yosano's Tangled Hair, published in 1901, had a sensational impact on Japanese literature, and we are pleased to make this highly praised translation (originally published 30 years ago) available once again in a revised Cheng & Tsui edition. Akiko reshaped the tanka, the most popular form of Japanese poetry for 1,200 years, into a modern poetic form. In this new work, her tanka appear in their original Japanese, in roman transliterations, and English translations along with a new preface and notes. Suitable for literature programs and translation courses."

Behind the life and work - the prose and poetry - of a literary genius. The only comprehensive study that examines all areas of Basho's work, including haibun, renku and critical commentaries.

The graceful, evocative haiku featured here were composed by the renowned Japanese haiku masters of the past four hundred years, including Matsuo Bash, Taniguchi Buson, and Kobayashi Issa. The deceptively simple poemsrendered in English with Japanese calligraphies and transliterationsare paired with exquisite eighteenth- or nineteenth-century paintings and ukiyo-e prints and twentieth-century shin hanga woodcuts from the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Canada. Haiku: Japanese Art and Poetry presents thirty-five pairs of poems and images, organized seasonally. The Introduction details the origin and development of haiku, the lives of the most famous poets, and the obstacles faced when translating the concise yet complex lines.

"With only three lines, and 45 syllables, how much can a poet fit within its confines? The answer is a world of story and emotion. Sijo, a 700-year-old Korean poetry form, is flourishing in modern-day poetry circles. Writers around the world are composing and publishing sijo, teaching it to classes, and competing with it for prizes. In SIJO: Korea’s Poetry Form, Sejong Cultural Society’s executive director Lucy Park and writer and educator Elizabeth Jorgensen create a primer for the poet. Written in three sections, their book presents the history of sijo, sample lessons for those teaching sijo, and a chapter of modern award-winning poems with critiques by the experts. With artwork by Wonsook Kim and contributions from sijo experts including David McCann, Mark Peterson, Seong-Kon Kim, Linda Sue Park, and Kwan-ho Seo, SIJO: Korea’s Poetry Form offers unparalleled instruction and advice on studying, teaching and writing sijo." (Recommended by Caroline Kim, MFA KidLit '25)