Asian American

A Free Life: A Novel

From Ha Jin, the widely-acclaimed, award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash, comes a novel that takes his fiction to a new setting: 1990s America. We follow the Wu family--father Nan, mother Pingping, and son Taotao--as they fully sever their ties with China in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and begin a new, free life in the United States.

At first, their future seems well-assured--Nan’s graduate work in political science at Brandeis University would guarantee him a teaching position in China--but after the fallout from Tiananmen, Nan’s disillusionment turns him towards his first love, poetry. Leaving his studies, he takes on a variety of menial jobs while Pingping works for a wealthy widow as a cook and housekeeper. As Nan struggles to adapt to a new language and culture, his love of poetry and literature sustains him through difficult, lean years.

Ha Jin creates a moving, realistic, but always hopeful narrative as Nan moves from Boston to New York to Atlanta, ever in search of financial stability and success, even in a culture that sometimes feels oppressive and hostile. As Pingping and Taotao slowly adjust to American life, Nan still feels a strange, paradoxical attachment to his homeland, though he violently disagrees with Communist policy. And severing all ties--including his love for a woman who rejected him in his youth--proves to be more difficult than he could have ever imagined.

Ha Jin’s prodigious talents are evident in this powerful new book, which brilliantly brings to life the struggles and successes that characterize the contemporary immigrant experience. With its lyrical prose and confident grace, A Free Life is a luminous addition to the works of one of the preeminent writers in America today.

Doveglion: Collected Poems (Penguin Classics)

The centennial edition of major Filipino writer José Garcia Villa’s collected poetry

Known as the “Pope of Greenwich Village,” José Garcia Villa had a special status as the only Asian poet among a group of modern literary giants in 1940s New York that included W. H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, and a young Gore Vidal. But beyond his exotic ethnicity, Villa was a global poet who was admired for “the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in [his] bravely deep poems” (Marianne Moore). Doveglion (Villa’s pen name—for dove, eagle, and lion) contains Villa’s collected poetry, including rare and previously unpublished material.

Commons (New California Poetry, 5)

Myung Mi Kim's Commons weighs on the most sensitive of scales the minute grains of daily life in both peace and war, registering as very few works of literature have done our common burden of being subject to history. Abstracting colonization, war, immigration, disease, and first-language loss until only sparse phrases remain, Kim takes on the anguish and displacement of those whose lives are embedded in history.
Kim's blank spaces are loaded silences: openings through which readers enter the text and find their way. These silences reveal gaps in memory and articulate experiences that will not translate into language at all. Her words retrieve the past in much the same way the human mind does: an image sparks another image, a scent, the sound of bombs, or conversation. These silences and pauses give the poems their structure.
Commons's fragmented lyric pushes the reader to question the construction of the poem. Identity surfaces, sinks back, then rises again. On this shifting ground, Kim creates meaning through juxtaposed fragments. Her verse, with its stops and starts, its austere yet rich images, offers splinters of testimony and objection. It negotiates a constantly changing world, scavenging through scraps of experience, spaces around words, and remnants of emotion for a language that enfolds the enormity of what we cannot express.

Camp Notes and Other Writings: Mitsuye Yamada

Mitsuye Yamada was born in Kyushu, Japan, and raised in Seattle, Washington, until the outbreak of World War II when her family was removed to a concentration camp in Idaho. Camp Notes and Other Writings recounts his experience.

Yamada's poetry yields a terse blend of emotions and imagery. Her twist of words creates a twist of vision that make her poetry come alive. The weight of her cultural experience-the pain of being perceived as an outsider all her life-permeates her work.

Yamada's strength as a poet stems from the fact that she has managed to integrate both individual and collective aspects of her background, giving her poems a double impact. Her strong portrayal of individual and collective life experience stands out as a distinct thread in the fabric of contemporary literature by women.

Writing and Enjoying Haiku: A Hands-on Guide

Writing and Enjoying Haiku shows how haiku can bring a centered, calming atmosphere into one's life, by focusing on the outer realities of life instead of the naggings of the inner mind, by gaining a new appreciation for the world of nature, and by preserving moments, days, and events so that they are not lost forever in the passage of time. Haiku are clearly shown to be a means of discovering and recording the miracles of the world, from the humorous to the tragic. This is one of the major themes underlying Writing and Enjoying Haiku-that haiku can provide a way to a better life.
After looking at why the reading and writing of haiku is important from a spiritual point of view, the book shows, as has never been done before, the techniques of writing-the when and the where, punctuation and capitalization, choice of words, figures of speech, sharing haiku, and much, much more.
Having come this far, having learned to read and write haiku with a discerning mind, the reader will never again look upon the world in quite the same way.

Human Dark with Sugar

“Sassy, tough-girl humor. . . . [Brenda] Shaughnessy’s voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip . . . consistently wry, and ever savvy.”—Harvard Review

“Brenda Shaughnessy . . . writes like the love-child of Mina Loy and Frank O’Hara.”—Exquisite Corpse

In her second book, winner of the prestigious James Laughlin Award, Brenda Shaughnessy taps into themes that have inspired era after era of poets. Love. Sex. Pain. The heavens. The loss of time. The weird miracle of perception. Part confessional, part New York School, and part just plain lover of the English language, Shaughnessy distills the big questions into sharp rhythms and alluring lyrics. “You’re a tool, moon. / Now, noon. There’s a hero.”

Master of diverse dictions, she dwells here on quirky words, mouthfuls of consonance and assonance—anodyne, astrolabe, alizarin—then catches her readers up short with a string of powerful monosyllables. “I’ll take / a year of that. Just give it back to me.” In addition to its verbal play, Human Dark With Sugar demonstrates the poet’s ease in a variety of genres, from “Three Sorries” (in which the speaker concludes, “I’m not sorry. Not sorry at all”), to a sequence of prose poems on a lover’s body, to the discussion of a disturbing dream. In this caffeine jolt of a book, Shaughnessy confirms her status as a poet of intoxicating lines, pointed, poignant comments on love, and compelling abstract images —not the least of which is human dark with sugar.

Brenda Shaughnessy was raised in California and is an MFA graduate of Columbia University. She is the poetry editor for Tin House and has taught at several colleges, including Eugene Lang College and Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn.

In Daddy's Arms I Am Tall: African Americans Celebrating Fathers

"When you follow in the path of your father, you learn to walk like him." This simple, yet potentially double-edged Ashanti proverb begins Javaka Steptoe's picture-book debut, a powerful collection of poems celebrating African American fathers, by new and established African American writers. Breathtaking, evocative mixed-media spreads--bedecked with beads, burlap, and buttons--earned Steptoe's brilliant collection the 1998 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award and the 1997 Reading Magic Award. A full-time artist and art teacher, Steptoe is the son of the late John Steptoe, also an acclaimed children's book artist. Regarding the process of creating the book, Steptoe says, "I was able to think about my father and how he affected me, and how I affected him, and give something to him by honoring his memory."

One selection, "Black Father Man" by Lenard D. Moore, begins, "Black Father Man, / the supreme earth dweller. / We are his ripe black crop / at the beginning-of-the-harvest. / We all bleed his blood / summer-hot and thick / summer-hot and thick / as unstrained milk. / Black Father Man, / the word-music messenger." Steptoe's accompanying artwork depicts men planting seeds and children growing, using actual dirt, leaves, seeds, paint, and cut paper to communicate the regenerative "we are his ripe black crop" spirit of the poem. In Folami Abiade's title poem, readers will soar high with the boy in his father's arms: "I am big and strong & proud like him / in daddy's arms / my daddy." Other contributors--including Carole Boston Weatherford, Michael Burgess, Davida Adedjouma (editor of The Palm of My Heart), and more--add humor and power to this extraordinary tribute to fatherhood. (All ages)

Fatherhood is celebrated with honor, humor, and grace in this intergenerational collection of poetry by new and established African-American writers. The book testifies to the powerful bond between father and child, with a profound message to people everywhere that family is the greatest gift and that fathers are among the most influential heroes. Twelve outstanding poems come to life through the spirited artwork of Javaka Steptoe.

Secret Asian Man

Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940

Revolution on Canvas, Volume 1: Poetry from the Indie Music Scene

The Beat Generation may have disbanded some 40 years ago, but its poetic spirit continues to pervade youth culture, speaking to millions. For decades, young adults have turned to poetry to find a voice for the raw emotion that characterizes adolescence. Now, REVOLUTION ON CANVAS sets out to reclaim and refresh poetry for todays youth in this collection that offers a little bit of everything for everyone. The writing, which ranges from the funny and absurd to heart wrenching, is an eclectic mix of poetry and prose authored by up-and-coming musicians who cover the spectrum of independent music. The bands behind this extraordinary collection, including A Static Lullaby, NOFX, The Format, and Finch, have collectively sold over a million records.