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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West
An unflinching hybrid collection of poems and essays that draws a powerful, necessary connection between the railroad's completion and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). (Publisher description)
Format: Book
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The Last Thing
To read these poems one after another is to experience a kind of double or triple vision: an American bedroom, an Ilocan [sic] coastal village, a Metuchen street. That vision leads, in turn, to felt connections, to loyalty as solid as Rosal’s firmest, longest lines. (Stephanie Burt, The New York Times)
Format: Book
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That Was Now, This Is Then
In this collection of poetry, Seshadri takes on the planar paradoxes of time and space, destabilizing highly tuned lyrics and elegies with dizzying turns in poems of unrequitable longing, of longing for longing, of longing to be found, of profound grief. (Publisher description)
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Customs
In Customs, Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America. (Publisher description)
Format: Book
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Tanya
The award-winning poet weaves a tapestry of literary heritage and intimate reflection as she pays tribute to women artists and mentors, and circles the ongoing mysteries of friendship, love, art, and loss. (Publisher description)
Format: Book
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The Wet Hex
Personal and environmental violations form the backdrop against which Sun Yung Shin examines questions of grievability, violence, and responsibility in The Wet Hex. (Publisher description)
Format: Book
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Line and Light
Line and Light illuminates the ways that ancestry holds and makes possible the act of making art. (Publisher description)
Format: Book
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From From
Intimate yet expansive, Youn's poems bring remarkable depth, candor, and intensity to personal and social history. (Publishers Weekly)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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The Rupture Tense
Shaped around moments of puncture and release, The Rupture Tense registers what leaks across the breached borders between past and future, background and foreground, silence and utterance. (Publishers Weekly)
Format: Book
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My Baby First Birthday
Radiant and tender, My Baby First Birthday is a collection that examines innocence, asking us who gets to be loved like a baby and who has to deplete themselves just to survive. (Publishers Weekly)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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