This is an ongoing list of APIA poetry collections which have informed my own poetics, my ideas of what gets to be called poetry. It’s been a while since I’ve read a lot of these books, so I am going on memory for a lot of this.
Here is List 1 | List 2. And below is List 3.
Linh Dinh, Borderless Bodies. Oh man, Linh Dinh. Human bodies and meat. This is what I think of. It’s grotesque, but true, and that’s something a lot of us don’t know how to talk about or want to talk about. As a poet, how do you go there, but still keep it reined in just barely enough so as not to go over the top with outrage for sake of outrage, victim and suffering porn, emotional coercion of your reader, knowing your poetry must move, stir, elicit complex emotion from your reader.
Russell Leong, The Country of Dreams and Dust. I love Leong’s poetic lines. They are so clean in this collection, so well-managed, if you will. So, as I’ve just said about keeping it barely reined in, he definitely does this here, balancing historical sweep of Asian migration and diaspora, so many small details, objects, textures, historical narrative in persona, and some lovely lyrical language. This whole collection is so well organized, and that is so appealing to me.
Nick Carbó, El Grupo McDonalds. This is one of the first poetry collections I’d ever read that centered what I think of as a contemporary transnational Filipino voice. I had first read some of this collection’s very thoughtfully crafted individual poems as an editor of Maganda magazine at UC Berkeley, and as an aspiring (proto-emerging) writer. You might say, it was the poetry I needed to read when I needed to read it. “Clean,” is a word I keep returning to. By clean, I mean no excess, just an apparent matter-of-fact tone that feels like it should be simple, but then, upon further thinking, you realize contains so many layers.
Genny Lim, Winter Place. Every time I see Lim perform, I think, damn, she is legit. In performance, her poems are a lion. On the page, it’s something different. So then, what I appreciate is that Lim’s poems translate well “from page to stage.” But more importantly, each venue (page, stage) brings forth an aspect or element of the work. On the page, lines that allow a slow unfold, something meditative, a quiet contemplation. Then on the stage, that roar.
Alan Chong Lau, Blues and Greens: A Produce Worker’s Journal. Yes, the grocery store! Specifically, as Asian one located in the International District of Seattle, where Lau apparently works (or worked). The beauty of a place like the Asian produce market in an American city is intersection and collision. As the worker, you are a witness to these intersections and collisions, so many brief encounters that bring forth some kind of possibly profound realization on the daily. Or not so profound. That our profound as poets and artists is someone’s everyday, or routine, or mundanity.
Laswon Fusao Inada, Drawing the Line. Inada reminds me so much of Manong Al Robles. The jazz cadence, the refrains and repetitions, the cultural and historical memory of a place and its people, or citizens. Poetry that is rooted in Americana, if you expand your ideas of Americana to include all its people’s voices and stories, its Mini Marts and Kwickie Lubes, its Japanese internment camps.
OK, more to come!