Description
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2022 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Terrance Hayes. The debut collection from Simon Shieh, Master is a stark, surreal, and imagistic reckoning with a traumatic past. Master follows the speaker's struggle with masculinity from a martial arts school in upstate New York to a boxing academy in Beijing. Language emerges in this collection not as a neutral witness to a boy’s subjugation, but as the very tool of hegemony, though one which also holds the key to its own undoing, and therefore to freedom. As much as Master is the story of pain, it is also a journey to healing, illuminating that while violence can be our patrimony, it does not have to be our destiny.
Trade ReviewPoets & Writers, "Performing the Future: Our Nineteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets"
Literary Hub, "A Month of Poetic Acrobatics: 7 New Poetry Books to Read in September"
Featured in Poetry Daily
"The phenomenal debut from Shieh is a stark and extraordinary investigation of a painful past, traversing the intricacies of violence and the journey toward healing."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Simon Shieh presents a poetics of emancipation, grappling with and deconstructing the memory of a master figure’s misused power. "
—Poets & Writers, "Performing the Future: Our Nineteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets"
"Simon Shieh’s Master is astonishing. . . . Shieh approaches childhood trauma by weaving a series of interconnected lyrics that interrogate power and control. The 'master,' the 'he' of these poems, runs the martial arts academy where the speaker is a child student. Small gestures shape a trajectory: he 'ties ropes around my wrists, blindfolds me' and 'moves my hand / to the left, moves my foot / to the right.' . . . [But] to extract from this intricate tapestry of a book is to sell it short: read it."
—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Literary Hub, "7 New Poetry Books to Read in September"
“This book feels like one of a kind. . . .
Master grapples with dream and memory: the song of hands in motion and the story of hands in action. This lyric and spare work is like the poet’s image of a Rottweiler holding butterflies in its mouth before letting them free. The poems can feel solitary and deliberate as ‘a sparring partner dancing to his own music.’ They can feel sensual and are poetic as ‘the water dripping off his body like missed syllables.’ Yes, I could introduce this book using nothing but dazzling excerpts. They reckon with the inexpressible. Beauty is set free from a mouth with fangs. I’m proud to select
Master for the Kathryn A. Morton prize.”
—Terrance Hayes, from the Introduction
“Simon Shieh ‘speak[s] the cadence of rain,’ reminding us that ‘each of us is a scorched page, part narrative, part dream.’ A gifted poet, each line is ‘an elegant lure.’ Master is a must-read, and Shieh is one of our most exciting and promising emerging poets.”
—Sherwin Jay Bitsui, winner of the American Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award for Flood Song
“This is one of the best collections I’ve read in a while. Simon Shieh’s voice is at once crisp and singular. His lines are tight, complex, and layered; his language unspools in powerful movements, so controlled and yet full of the devastating grace that precedes a final blow: ‘shattering the bone around my left eye/the doctors called it orbital//my mistake: resting my head/on his shoulder—letting him cradle it in his arms.’ The beauty in this book is heartbreaking, brutal. Unsparing in its analysis and deconstruction of power, Master is a startling and stunning debut collection.”
—Sally Wen Mao, author of The Kingdom of Surfaces
“If you surrender to Simon Shieh’s Master, if you let your eyes grow accustomed to its voluptuous and troubling dark, you will be rewarded with a singular reading experience: merciless in its vision and craft, dripping with muscularity and sweat, Shieh’s thrilling debut will leave you breathless.”
—Ama Codjoe, author of Bluest Nude
Table of ContentsTable of Contents
Kindness Comes Too Easily to Wicked Men
Part I
Act I
Master (Five Nocturnes)
Drawing of a Skeleton
Reverence
Descendent
every scar is an eye which has seen too much
Part II
Ripening
Patrimony
after seven days I hear his voice
Testing the Waters
Self-Defense
Obsession
Clearing the Hills
What is Is Left
Part III
Mythomania
Day One
Specter
Feel Him Out
Training in Yizhuang
He Says My Name
The Queen’s Birthday, Bangkok (2011)
Cutting Weight
Record
To hide from the dead / To be with the living
Absolution
Self-Portrait
