Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Poets
Celebrate Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month with these poetry collections by Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander poets. Annotations adapted as noted. This list created by a librarian at The Seattle Public Library. (May 2024)
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Sukun
Ali’s poetry is known for its lyrical and expressive language, as well as its exploration of themes such as love, loss, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. (Publisher description)
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The Moon That Turns You Back
A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection--a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. (Publisher description)
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Hard Damage
In lyric and documentary poems and essayistic fragments, Aria Aber explores the historical and personal implications of Afghan American relations. (Publisher description)
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Poetry as Spellcasting
Divided into four sections, Poetry as Spellcasting utilizes poetry as a tool for healing-justice transformation. The book guides readers to explore and deepen the creative and intuitive parts of themselves as catalysts for transformative healing and social change. (Publisher description)
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Feast
Feast offers abundance and nourishment through language, and reaches toward a place an immigrant might call home. The poems in this collection - many of which revolve around food and its cultural significances - examine the brown body's relationship with nourishment. (Publisher description)
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Togetherness
A debut poetry collection in which non-binary poet and drag performer Wo Chan recounts stories from their queer childhood and adolescence. (Publisher description)
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The Trees Witness Everything
The elegant and reflective fourth collection from Chang (Obit) presents a moving elegy for both her deceased mother and the dying Earth, using form to capture the fleeting nature of life. (Publishers Weekly)
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Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency
In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his investigation of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer Asian American living through an era of Trump, mass shootings, and the COVID-19 pandemic. (Publisher description)
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The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes on
The urgent and lyrically dynamic third collection from Choi addresses intergenerational trauma and the anxieties of living in a world skating on the precipice of apocalypse. (Publishers Weekly)
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I Do Everything I'm Told
Bristling with restlessness and wit, Megan Fernandes' I Do Everything I'm Told explores disobedience and worship, false beloveds, possessiveness, and long nights of solitude. (Publisher description)
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