Search results for ""author ko ko thett""

"The Burden of Being Burmese displays an extraordinary fertile and febrile imagination—one 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 collection—the first major volume in English by a contemporary Burmese poet—range 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.

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Ko ko thett’s poems — described by John Ashbery as “brilliantly off-kilter” — bring oddball lists, linguistic inventiveness, and sardonic humor to the brutal contradictions of life and history in and outside of his native Burma. In some poems he muses on chairs or metaphors or potatoes, while elsewhere, and often with the same, dispassionate tone, he turns his gaze on a strangulating bureaucracy or the horrific treatment of prisoners. Thett writes in Burmese and in English. In this second volume to appear in English, most are English originals but thirteen will be presented bilingually on facing pages.

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