When Ping arrives to live in New Zealand in the 1960s, the young mother from Hong Kong is expecting “paradise”. On her first night, Ping compares her new home with her homeland. Poet Grace Yee writes:   Ping steps out into a million-starred hush – not traffic horns sizzling woks banging cleaves clacking mahjong tiles no hoicking squabbling squawking singing – seven-thirty in the evening, her kitten heels sinking in the dew-soaked law, the whole word asleep.   But of course, it isn’t paradise. The family settles in their new home (house number 18, “8 is the lucky number fat number mea ..read more

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 America. At the grocery store, life appears prosaic, as described by the speaker’s younger self in the sonnet “Homework”:   I wrote in Mrs. Katz’s fifth-grade class in Jericho, Long Island, this short answer for homework ..read more

Sweet malida is a dish made from rice grains softened in water mixed with sugar and dried fruit and nuts. It’s enjoyed in Afghan, Indian and Pakistani homes, and it’s also a dish popular with the Bene Israel, a Jewish community with a 2000 year history in India. Zilka Joseph has written before about her Bene Israel background, but her new book, Sweet Malida: Memories of a Bene Israel Woman, is a more vivid account of the origins of the Bene Israel and its many delicious culinary dishes. In the title poem, “Sweet Malida”, Joseph begins with the ingredients of this dish and goes on to note how f ..read more

When Mark Twain interviewed the leader of the Mormon Church, Brigham Young, in 1861, he found the religious patriarch mightily preoccupied with the problems of equal treatment for his 56 wives. Young told Twain of gifting a handkerchief or a fan to one woman; before long, all the other wives clamored for similar attentions. Polygamy’s downside provides the starting point for the epic poem, The Theft of a Tree, composed in classical Telegu by Nandi Timmana for Krishnadeveraya, ruler of the 16th century, south Indian, Vijayanagara empire. Surely the maharaja, with three documented consorts, coul ..read more

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.   Halfway through my life the reeds by Meguro River where the ducks made love stop whistling. I fear I’ve over- inked, or the linseed oil soured the sky. The wind tastes of oysters grilled over autumn soil. A fish draws a ripple, or did a raindrop win? My papers will topple the house before the tin roof falls. I’d better make haste and find a ..read more

The poet Ghalib took a broad view about spirituality and ritual. He told a British friend he was half a Muslim, because while he wouldn’t eat pork, he enjoyed as hurrah peg of whiskey. Did Ghalib retain a medieval belief in cultic efficiency, or did he have a modern’s skepticism about revealed religions in general? That question comes to mind when reading his 108-verse long praise poem to the city of Vanarasi—so holy to the Hindus. In 1826, Ghalib, perpetually beset by debts and cheated out an inheritance by conniving relatives, set off mostly by foot and bullock cart from Delhi to Calcutta, i ..read more

Deeply experimental, creative and thought-provoking, From From by leading Korean-American poet Monica Youn, looks at the complexity of race through myths, history and popular culture, comparing the ways “otherness” is seen in both East Asian and Western cultures and norms. Through these complex, original and tragic-comic poems, the poet explores the deep roots of human fear or hysteria against other bodies.  Throughout the collection, there are mini sequences of poems that draw from Greek mythology and yet these are poems that examine or revisit body metaphors. Some of the poems capture t ..read more

Active in the 13th century, poet Matsuo Basho has been a cornerstone of literature globally since the late 19th century when the word haiku was used to cover traditional “haikai” and “hokku” (more about which further down). Largely due to 19th-century Realism, Western onlookers and practitioners have made much of direct personal experience in haiku; DT Suzuki, Alan Watts and the Beat poets in turn exaggerated the influence of Zen on haiku, lauding their depth of truth and presence. Haiku has since become the world’s most prevalent poetic form, with Basho the standard bearer.    ..read more

Issues of identity take center stage in Mary Jean Chan’s new poetry collection Bright Fear. Chan’s poems deal with a variety of uncomfortable personal experiences: growing up queer in a Chinese household, dealing with racism and racial prejudice when moving to the United Kingdom, and grappling with learning—and then eventually writing in and making a career out of—the “colonial language”, as Chan puts it, of English. But Chan also makes clear that to understand a poet solely through the lens of lived experience is to deny the work its multi-dimensionality, to flatten the poem into simple autob ..read more

“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 in the United States—so widely has the poem become emblematic of American imperialism and the “civilizing mission” during the 19th and 20th centuries. Those lines also mark the entry point of Christine Imperial’s new book Mistaken for an Empire: A Memoir in Tongues, a hyb ..read more