Indebted to the docupoetics tradition, Raena Shirali’s summonings investigates the ongoing practice of witch (“daayan”) hunting in India.
Category Archive: Poetry
Shawn Hoo’s debut poetry chapbook, Of the Florids, begins with an inability to speak of the natural world in the urban fortress of Singapore; a tropical island’s fading romanticism for a city boy.
In Muscle Memory, Washington-based poet Jenny Liou grapples with violence and identity, beginning with the chain-link enclosure of the prizefighter’s cage and radiating outward into the diasporic sweep of Chinese American history.
New Book Announcement: “The All-Seeing Eye: Collected Poems” by Shang Qin, translated by John Balcom
Shang Qin (1930–2010) is widely considered one of the most influential and original modern Chinese poets. His critical acclaim was earned not only as a modern master of the prose poem but also as one of Taiwan’s leading surrealist poets. This book is the largest selection of his poetry available in English.
Devendra Bisaria’s first publication contains poems written over a period of almost thirty years—from his teens, when he started writing, to twenty years ago. The poems in this collection bear witness to Devendra’s own internal evolution as a person as well as his keen observation of the external environment and circumstances that fueled, and frequently provoked, that process.
Born in 1976 in Hengdian village, Hubei Province, Yu Xiuhua is a poet from an impoverished rural background who was born with cerebral palsy. She began writing poetry in 1998. Her poetry collection Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm sold over 300,000 copies in China. Yu received the Peasant Literature Award in 2016 and the Hubei Literary Prize in 2018.
Proof of Stake is a multivalent meditation on loss, grief, and social constructs. Grounded in the death of the poet’s daughter, Vivian, this long elegy ruminates on a wide range of subjects, from the effects and winding paths of disruptive technologies, such as paper and cryptocurrency, to critiques and observations of art movements, diasporas, social unrest, and the history of the Philippines.