Ричард Бланко0.0 Book Description In his second book of narrative, lyric poetry , Richard Blanco explores the familiar, unsettling journey for home and connections, those anxious musings about other lives: "Should I live here? Could I live here?" Whether the
Эндрю Лэм0.0 In his long-overdue first collection of essays, noted journalist and NPR commentator Andrew Lam explores his lifelong struggle for identity as a Viet Kieu, or a Vietnamese national living abroad. At age eleven, Lam, the son of a South Vietnamese general, came to California on the eve of the fall of Saigon to communist forces. He traded his Vietnamese name for a more American one and immersed himself in the allure of the American dream: something not clearly defined for him or his family. Reflecting on the meanings of the Vietnam War to the Vietnamese people themselves—particularly to those in exile—Lam picks with searing honesty at the roots of his doubleness and his parents’ longing for a homeland that no longer exists.
Эд Бок Ли0.0 Book Description A dramatic debut, Real Karaoke People juxtaposes tradition and pop culture to bridge generations and continents in a way both heart-rending and real. Poems and prose engage readers with vivid and emotional portrayals of
Кэрил Филиппс0.0 In this searing novel, Caryl Phillips reimagines the life of the first black entertainer in the U.S. to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune. After years of struggling for success on the stage, Bert Williams (1874—1922), the child of recent immigrants from the Bahamas, made the radical decision to don blackface makeup and play the “coon.” Behind this mask he became a Broadway headliner – as influential a comedian as Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and W. C. Fields, who called him “the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.” It is this dichotomy at Williams’ core that Phillips explores in this richly nuanced, brilliantly written novel, unblinking in its attention to the sinister compromises that make up an identity.
Jennifer Tseng0.0 This debut collection of poetry by Jennifer Tseng traces the immigrant's journey, one filled with distant families, sea crossings, sweet fruits, and buried violins. Whether remembering a father's "unseen clock, his well-wound mystery" or poetically re-imagining the "autobiography of an immigrant," the speaker in these poems never fails to create a sense of intimacy. Tseng's vibrant and penetrating voice urges the reader to follow her to a "society against loneliness,/devoted to memory, language/the translation of dreams."
"Sometimes poetry feels like a real community whether it was intended to or not. I experience that very much with Jennifer Tseng's remarkable The Man With My Face. I want to be 'him.' Whoever he is or is not--more importantly I want to be many of the people and lives here--the lives in these poems make room for the lives around my life. Met and as yet unmet. Tseng writes a poetry that is constantly vibrant and penetrating." --Michael Burkard
"The immigrant father carries the old country in his own body, and for his children the father's body is always a link to a lost world. In Jennifer Tseng's signature poem, 'Indecipherable Guide to Strange Birds,' two daughters study an unreadable chart where their father s recorded the fluctuations of his own body, and learn only that he is 'a master of codes, king of all the beautiful birds in America.' Such moments are illuminated here with grace and a force of feeling, especially in the beautiful sequence of prose poems that closes this striking and insightful debut." -- Mark Doty
