A family grocery store is the primary backdrop for Korean American writer Rosanna Young Oh’s debut poetry collection The Corrected Version: a backdrop refracted by memory and myth. Taken at face value, the grocery store—owned and run by Oh’s immigrant parents—represents the regular mundanity, tediousness and humiliation that accompanies the experience of starting over in…
“Take up the White Man’s burden— / Send forth the best ye breed— / Go bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need,” starts Rudyard Kipling’s notorious poem of American expansionism in the Philippines, “The White Man’s Burden”. Those lines will ring familiar to many, particularly those who have received an education…
Kit Fan’s latest poetry collection, The Ink Cloud Reader, hinges on anticipation of change. In “Cumulonimbus,” which opens the main section of the book, Fan compares the current state of his writing career to the moments before a thunderstorm breaks.
Can Xue’s experimental novella Mystery Train opens in total darkness: a chicken-farm employee named Scratch wakes up to find himself “in one of [the] pitch-dark sleeper cars” of a train. Confused, Scratch gets out of bed and looks at his wrist to check the time, but is unable to make out the face of his…
One of the first poems in Wang Yin’s recent collection, A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts, finds the Chinese poet in an unexpected place: Vermont. “The Task of the Poet, Written in Vermont After Robert Bly” opens with a pastoral scene on a front lawn, where the poet peacefully observes—and records—the sights and…