Thinking Its Presence

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.’