Abstract

Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry argues against reductive modes of reading Asian American poetry. The book builds its case by focusing with great particularity on the writings of five contemporary Asian American poets who range in age from their early forties to late sixties—Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, John Yau, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Pamela Lu—and whose poems represent a spectrum of literary styles, from expressive lyric to less transparently representational and more formally experimental. Each poet’s body of work is considered in turn through detailed readings, a formal crux or mode (metaphor, irony, parody, a syntax of contingency, the subjunctive mood) whose deployment is central to his or her poetic project and whose structure articulates and enacts in language the poet’s working out of a larger political (in the broadest sense of that term) and/or poetic concern or question. By doing intensive and serious readings of these particular Asian American poets’ use of language and linguistic forms this book aims to show how erroneous we have been to view Asian American poetry through a simplistic, reductive, and essentializing lens: as a homogenous lump of ’nonliterary’ writing by ’Asians.’

Full Text
Paper version not known

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call

Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.