Description
Book Synopsis"The Burden of Being Burmese displays an extraordinary fertile and febrile imaginationone that will both delight and disturb American readers."Marjorie Perloff "A brilliantly off-kilter book."John Ashbery Ko Ko Thett writes that he is "a poet by choice and a Burmese by chance." The poems in this collectionthe first major volume in English by a contemporary Burmese poetrange from "faddish sugar crystals," written in Burmese for his 1996 illegal campus chapbook in Yangon, to his autumn 2014 "anxiety attack" in the Netherlands, where he now lives. Thett is the co-editor and translator of the seminal volume Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets.
Table of Contents3 to the navel of the earth 6 panning for alluvial gold [at the confluence of her dreams] 8 bullhorns in the passing lane 10 a few ways to eat a city raw 13 the boomtown 15 chaos clock 19 welcome to the fort town of ba htoo 21 lawksawk 24 neue donau [the new danube] 26 akdeniz [the white sea] 28 urban renewal 30 faddish sugar crystals 31 permanent installations 34 coup d’état 35 sad [seasonal affective disorder] 36 lady’s fingers 37 how to roast an osturducken [and get away with it] 38 i swim 39 fuck me untied 41 after “the lie of art” 43 hallowe’en 45 blindfolded brahmins 48 a walk with history 50 myanma: a collage 53 cut 55 my generation is best 57 no football color 58 timely applause and toothy smiles 59 corpse flower blooms in washington 60 the mandalay gazette 1885 62 pyongyang people’s daily 64 child corpses 66 the 5000th 69 i told you there’s a fire 71 the rain maker 73 anxiety attack 75 f a i t h s u p p e r 76 the burden of being bama 78 no romance love 79 the day he regretted swimming butterfly [across the baltic with a beer can in his hand] 80 strawman story 81 strawman [in re-verse] 82 i’ve seen death 85 water elephant 86 monosodium glutamate 88 monsoon 89 encomium for mr. yew 91 cuban fish-head soup 93 Notes 101 Afterword
