Asian Heritage Month: Poetry Part Two May 28, 2019 – Posted in: Highlights – Tags: Asian Heritage Month, Poetry
Today, we’ve got some more great poetry titles for Asian Heritage Month to bring to your attention! Don’t forget to click on the titles below to learn more about your next favourite book!
“Bodymap” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: Finalist for the 2015 Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, Shortlisted for the ReLit Poetry Award! In this volume, Leah Lakshmi maps hard and vulnerable terrains of queer desire, survivorhood, transformative love, sick and disabled queer genius and all the homes we claim and deserve.
“Consensual Genocide” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: The first volume of poetry by Leah is full of the stories we’ve been waiting for. Tracing bloodlines from Sri Lanka’s civil wars to Brooklyn and Toronto streets, these fierce poems are full of heart and guts, telling raw truths about brown girl border crossings before and after 9/11, surviving abuse, mixed-race journeys and high femme rebellions.
“Enough to be Mortal Now” by Rienzi Crusz: As Crusz meditates on the edge of silence, he walks feistily as always through the scowl of age and lovingly through the many idioms of the sun, revelling in the poetic spaces he has defined with his “singing metaphors” and the dance of words.
“Insurgent Rain” by Rienzi Crusz: A definitive edition that brings together the best from the published poetry of Rienzi Crusz, who has been called “arguably the best living Sri Lankan poet in English.” (World Literature Today).
“Kabir’s Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets” by Ayaz Pirani: Aglow with postcolonial loss, wryly defiant of what they reveal, the poems in this collection describe a warm estrangement and salty gratitude for being on Earth.
“Love in a Time of Technology” by Sasenarine Persaud: Shortlisted for the Guyana Prize, Best Book of Poetry, 2014! Whether in the heart of downtown Toronto, a bookstore in Boston, the courtyard of the Taj Mahal–through the portals of cyberspace–on the banks of a Tampa river, or a journey through time to Georgetown, an old colonial capital, love circumscribes everything.
“Monsoon on the Fingers of God” by Sasenarine Persaud: Set against the backdrop of the 2014 Scottish referendum, Monsoon on the Fingers of God continues an ongoing exploration of forms and improvisation on styles, rhythm/taal, and raagic moods in an examination of identity, history and human migrations.
“The Game of 100 Ghosts” by Terry Watada: Inspired by an old Japanese parlour game of the Edo period (1603-1868), The Game of 100 Ghosts is a lyrical tribute to the poet’s friends and relations who recently departed their lives. This wonderful collection then evokes the spirits of lost friends and relations while paying tribute to a tradition.
“Uncivil War” by Indran Amirthanayagam: Passionate, committed, and deeply humane, these poems bear witness with unflinching honesty to the horrific violence of the Sri Lankan civil war.