Asian American Poets Research Articles

Sidewise Looks: Asian American Poets Revisit Wallace Stevens

Abstract: While common knowledge on Wallace Stevens suggests that he influenced only one Asian American poet (his friend, the scholar Peter H. Lee), a fuller investigation into Stevens's legacy reveals that he very well may be the Anglophone modernist with the most widespread and enduring influence on the past eighty years of Asian American poetics. In this essay's first half, I retell the history of Stevens's reception by Asian American poets, distinguishing it from his reception by Black poets (on the one hand) and from Asian American poets' responses to modernist orientalism (on the other). In the essay's second half, I offer a flexible argument about the indispensability of Stevensian abstraction to two of the most celebrated poets of their generation, Arthur Sze and Vijay Seshadri.

“Maybe nothing is an elegy”

Abstract This article investigates two central aspects of contemporary elegy: (1) the plausible and tempting assumption of it being disentangled from formal constraints, something that might have generated a major historical shift from poetry as a poetic form to an elegiac mode of discourse (Bardazzi, Giusti, and Tandello 2022); (2) the formal glitch it creates and, at times, reconciles via the lyric and its generative tension between personal and collective, narrative and non-narrative dimensions, linear and non-linear temporalities. This study does so by focusing on two authors who have weaved together a poetics of mourning the paternal figure: OBIT (2020) by the Asian American poet Victoria Chang and Geologia di una padre [Geology of a father] (2013) by the Italian poet Valerio Magrelli.

“My body is its image, here”: Diasporic Identity and the Deconstruction of Binary Division in 21st Century Asian American Poetry

This paper examines the poems of Franny Choi and Victoria Chang within the context of Asian American poetry, poetics, and criticism. It demonstrates how Choi and Chang’s work engage in a destabilization of binaries in order to rewrite and re-construct Asian American identity. A close reading of Choi’s “Chatroulette” from her collection, Soft Science, and Chang’s “Home” from her collection, Obit, reveals disruptions of five binary divisions, broadly identified as “high” poetic form and “low” poetic form, Eastern and Western, English and non-English, embodiment and disembodiment, and past and present. This paper argues that the deconstructions of these five binaries represent a search for belonging in the context of Asian American identity, as it is an identity that itself transverses the boundaries of “Asian” and “American.” This is supported by scholars of Asian American literature such as Michael Leong, Brigitte Wallinger-Schorn, and Zhou Xiaojing, who investigate how Asian American poets navigate alterity and cultural hybridity through innovation. It concludes by examining questions of home and belonging, theorizing that, for Asian American poets, reinventing language in a way that transgresses binaries and dichotomies allows for the construction of a new “home” that accepts the indeterminacies of identity, life, and death rather than resisting them.

Sharaf Rashidov and the international dimensions of Soviet Uzbekistan

ABSTRACT During the Cold War, Sharaf Rashidov became a representative of the Soviet anti-imperialist agenda, a key interlocutor with Third World leaders and a promoter of Uzbekistan as a modern and emancipated model of political, economic, social and cultural development for newly independent countries emerging from decolonization. Tashkent hosted important meetings among Soviet and Asian leaders, along with international festivals of cinema and literature, which attracted hundreds of Asian, African and Latin American intellectuals, writers, poets, journalists, trade unionists and athletes. Moreover, Uzbekistan came to symbolize the self-proclaimed compatibility between communism and Islam, offering a façade of religious freedom, tolerance and tradition combined with Bolshevik progress. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan discredited this narrative – and Uzbekistan and (posthumously) Rashidov were humiliated in the Cotton Affair – pointing to the impact as well as the limits of Uzbek internationalism.

Invention No. 12 in A-fl at major

Invention No. 12 in A-fl at major Hyejung Kook (bio) for two voices ⌠ A scant handful, if I'd dared to touch.⌡ Tender, the young jindallaekkot, ⌠ Soft gray feathers, an olive undercoat,⌡ wild azalea, the kind which won't survive ⌠ spring green throat.⌡ transplanting. Or how I twisted ⌠ Bom chorok mok.⌡ and tore off branches, still leafless, ⌠ Blood still red against concrete,⌡ trusses of rose-purple scattering ⌠ cracked by the gingko's roots.⌡ as I lay them in the snow ⌠ Looking down to keep my footing⌡ at your feet, ⌠ I lost it, seeing you.⌡ to hem you in. ⌠ Upsujussuh.⌡ Still you disappeared. ⌠ Were you vireo, did you sing,⌡ Like Bede's swallow arrowing [End Page 70] ⌠ I am green, I am verdant,⌡ out of darkness, ⌠ I am fresh? Not knowing⌡ through the fire-lit hall ⌠ yet I swear, you were here, mattered⌡ straight back into winter storms. ⌠ still matter, even gone.⌡ Flickered, fluttered, gone. [End Page 71] Hyejung Kook Hyejung Kook's poetry has recently appeared in The World I Leave you: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books, 2020), Half Mystic Radio, The Massachusetts Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and previously in Pleiades. A Kundiman fellow, Hyejung was born in Seoul, grew up in Pennsylvania, and now lives in Kansas with her husband and their two young children. As a Fulbright grantee, she spent a year teaching English at Bongmyeong Middle School in Cheongju, Korea. You can find her at hyejungkook.tumblr.com. Copyright © 2020 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Shreela Ray: An Introduction

Shreela Ray: An Introduction Kazim Ali (bio) I want to talk about the “secret history.” The term itself acknowledges that whether the history is known or not, it has an impact upon our present lives, which is to say the “secret” is worth knowing. It’s not only to better understand our present that we seek to learn the secret history: we also want to give due to past masters who were marginalized by political conditions, colonization, or intended or unintended discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality, or national origin. We also want to actively work on constructing (or reconstructing or restoring) our own lost lineages; excavating those lineages also provides a means for the present to affect the future. At the previous festival, I was asked to give a lecture considering the Asian American canon. This lecture was later published as an essay called, somewhat ominously, “The End of the Canon.” The reason I worried about this canon was that in terms of South Asian American poetry, to narrow the focus a little, that canon has had tenuous beginnings. In the essay, I discussed the early deaths of two important South Asian American poets, Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001) and Reetika Vazirani, who died just two years later (1962–2003) and after publishing only two books (a third was published posthumously). The third poet I discussed in that essay, Meena Alexander, has also since passed away. But of these three poets, none were widely published in the US in the 1970s. Ali’s first US book was published in 1987; his earlier two books were published in Calcutta. Alexander’s first US book was published the following year, 1988. Vazirani is somewhat younger; her books came out in 1997 and 2003. The first widely read and widely published South Asian American poet was, in fact, Shreela Ray. Ray’s lyrics—often stark, sometimes tart, always sharp—were among the first poems I encountered in English when I was a high school student studying poetry in western New York. The individual poems came to me first in the form of strongly smelling, nearly damp, purple-lettered mimeographed copies in a workshop at the public library taught by a local poet named Elaine Chamberlain, and then later in my high school creative writing class, courtesy of my teacher Mary Richert. It wasn’t until I was researching this lecture that I came to know that Mary Richert knew Shreela Ray quite well, and that the summer after that first early creative writing class, Richert and Ray had gone on an epic cross-country road trip in India. Shreela Ray was born in Orissa province (now called Odisha) in India in 1942. Born into a Hindu and Christian Indian family, she spent her early [End Page 103] childhood in England and India and then moved to the United States for college in 1960, attending the Iowa Writers Workshop to receive an MFA in Creative Writing, and later attending the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She developed relationships with many of the leading luminaries of the time who recognized her talent, among them W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, John Berryman, William Meredith, Isabella Gardner, and Galway Kinnell, as well as Leslie Fiedler and John Logan, with whom she studied at the University of Buffalo; Logan later wrote the introduction to the one-and-only volume of poems she published during her lifetime, Night Conversations with None Other (Dust Books, 1977). Ray eventually married a fellow student, Hendrik De Leeuw, and settled in Rochester, New York, where she became part of the burgeoning poetry scene then centered around Al Poulin, a professor at Brockport State College who would go on to found the influential small press BOA Editions and the Brockport Writers Forum in Rochester, New York. She began publishing her work in national venues, including Poetry, in the mid-1960s. Ray’s work was noted for its urbane and cosmopolitan phrasing, its dark wit, and the multiple lineages from which it drew—as much from a contemporary Indian lineage that might include Kamala Das, Adil Jussawalla, and Eunice De Souza as from a more global Anglophone lyric as favored by Seamus Heaney, Derek...

From the Asian American Literature Festival

From the Asian American Literature Festival Jennifer Chang (bio) and Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis We associate lectures with dull erudition and cold, sterile lecture halls. Our associations with history are hardly different: history, we think, exudes importance with broad-shouldered publicity, such pomp. But for marginalized communities, our cultural knowledge has come with far less fanfare. When Juan Felipe Hererra was finishing his first term as US Poet Laureate, he gave a closing lecture on Chicano poetry at the Library of Congress. Rather than a general historical survey, it was an inside, loving look at poems that moved him, poets who’d been forgotten, snapshots lost to time. It was an “intimate” lecture, “intimate” indicating the kind of history: connective rather than individual, away from the public eye, away too from the noisy markers of awards, acclaim, critical attention. The Secret Histories series, launched as part of the 2019 Asian American Literature Festival, borrows the spirit of Hererra’s lecture. By attending to quiet interludes, off-to-the-side exchanges, and personal relationships, we strive to remake what we think of as the ground of American literary history into a more complex and human landscape. Through sharing lost histories and secret knowledge, we might bind the Asian American literary community more tightly together. Secret Histories begins with, opens through the eyes of, mid-career Asian American poets and writers and the question of where they fit in a matrix of inheritance, of veneration, of portaging the things we need to live from one place to another, one time to another. The first commissioned talks from Kazim Ali, Jennifer Chang, Ching-In Chen, and Cathy Park Hong, three of whom you’ll find collected in the pages that follow, take a focus on the lost, the quiet, the under-attended to, those we’ve neglected to honor. These essays trace an imperative the scholar Juliana Chang once signaled in her introduction to the anthology Quiet Fire: A Historical Anthology of Asian American Poetry, 1892–1970 : “I was constantly confronted with the spec-tre of lost history: how many copies of these fragile, dusty books were left in the world? How could we begin to find out about some of the more obscure poets, whose books were published by small presses that have long since vanished? How are these pieces relics of a now-gone life and history? How do we read, in the present, these remains of the past?” [End Page 102] Jennifer Chang Jennifer Chang is the author of two books of poems, The History of Anonymity (University of Georgia Press, 2008) and Some Say the Lark (Alice James Books, 2017), winner of the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her essays on poetry have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, New Literary History, the Volta, and in books on Asian American literature and culture and the Harlem Renaissance. She co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman and teaches at George Washington University and at Bennington College’s MFA in Writing program. Copyright © 2020 Middlebury College Publications

Theorizing difference and difficulty: “wreading” Asian American poetics in South Korea

ABSTRACTReflecting on a personal experience teaching and studying Asian American poetry in South Korea, this paper examines how and why Asian American poetry in South Korea has been marginalized in the academia and argues that Asian American poetry needs to be newly dealt as a frontier that vigorously experiments the role of cultural poetics and humanities in and out of the university programs. The reception of Asian American poets and their poetry in South Korea is inseparable from the interpellation and understanding of Asian Americans as subject. This essay, rather than inscribing Anglo American critical frame that has focused on the reductive reading of essentializing racial traits and minority identities, tries to build a platform for inviting inter/cross-cultural thinking under the umbrella of poetry reading. Through the process of “wreading” Asian American poetry, I argue that difficulty and difference can be reinterpreted as practical monitors for alternative reading of Asian American poetry against the grain of the white Anglican national self of America.

‘Mother Weight Carried across Borders’: Migrant Materiality and the Maternal in Meena Alexander’s Fault Lines: A Memoir (2003)

ABSTRACT The article discusses the memoir Fault Lines by South Asian-American poet and writer Meena Alexander in terms of a poetics of migration, reflecting upon what Alexander refers to as female migrancy. The analysis focuses upon the mother–daughter relationship as the site of realignments and redefinitions at the core of this autobiographical narrative. The positionality of the mother, amma, amidst the contingency of migration, leads to productive re-castings of the narrative of womanhood and a re-consideration of women’s historical situatedness at the crossroads, and fault lines as it were, of national histories and female traditions. On a deeply personal note, the article is an in memoriam piece, dedicated to Alexander who lost her battle with cancer in late 2018. Meena was my former professor, mentor and doctoral dissertation adviser in the English Department, Graduate Center, City University of New York. She and I both considered mothers foundational, and it was Meena’s special grace to guide me into an intellectual space where I could articulate my thoughts about mothers and daughters and about the maternal and filial bond transformed by migration.

I walk past the mental hospital], and: [Some humans are living sewers], and: [The things we carry—what to do?

[I walk past the mental hospital], and: [Some humans are living sewers], and: [The things we carry—what to do?] Kevin Phan (bio) [I walk past the mental hospital] I walk past the mental hospital. Mother lived thereonce, in her mid-20s, her spectrum too tired fortears. Friendliness without conditions toward allbeings. Something to feel into over & over. Shamein space. According to Thy will, this wall ofstorms. All of my relations & stuffed crust pizza.Joyless surprise, mother dead at 59. Rootbeerfloats & wheelchair happy (final) birthday.Cubbies took the World Series—applause sewn in.Cheesecake for all! "If it's not one thing, it'sanother," mother said, "I'll be dead soon." Wordslandslide. No remorse. Flat facts slay harder thanthe others. From the necks of my brother, myfather, my aunts, my uncles, my niece, my nephew,my cousins, the walls, the dead, the sky, thebathtub tenderness streaked—little silver arrows.The dankest honey is grief. [Some humans are living sewers] Some humans are living sewers. No, we don'toriginate from "shithole countries." Fact is, the only"shithole" coming to mind is the one betweenTrump's nose & chin. Every glad leaf of each treewill slap its hand. Soft applause for beautiful flaws, [End Page 182] for ex-loves reeking purple grief. Figments of mydog-walking neighbor slurred down the street—flash bang rage—raging down his dog namedCharcoal. "Charcoal, Charcoal, Charcoal, Charcoal,Charcoal, get over here!" Mother's eternity,spangled in gold pine needles. Mother, anotherhorizon I'll no more touch. (Dead ones bumpingdown my heart's soft walls.) Whole countries ofhumans, whipping up hate speech, bleeding thedrugs in, reeking sex, humming applause. For me,Buddha + Jesus all day—both made waves. "Whenwe die," says my uncle, "we fall like leaves,returning our energy to the roots & source." I heareach generation, past & future, calling to me fromour shared earth. [The things we carry—what to do?] The things we carry—what's to do? At the airport,on the way to my mother's hospice, I distinctlyremember crying into a Big Mac. Hardly even shyabout it. Denver International Airport—Gate B29.December 4th, 2:45 pm. Terminal carpet, Coca-Cola stained. Shakes like a quarry giving up.Watching you watching me. Grief drunk & scuffedby glower. Nakedness in public while still wearingclothes. Nobody asked me where it hurt. Orangepill bottles, blueprint to a luckless life. "Bonecancer, pelvis soft as cottage cheese. Not normal.She won't last long," sd doctor. Her final line,"Hello, Kevin," then she died. "He has taken all thegalaxies / into his face," wrote Rilke. Fine to thinkour inscapes Barbie-pretty. But aren't we all merecandidates for the coming slaughter? [End Page 183] Kevin Phan Kevin Phan is an Asian-American poet from outside Denver, CO. His work has appeared in Notre Dame Review, Colorado Review, PANK, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Closing Waves, will be published in Black Warrior Review. Copyright © 2019 University of Nebraska Press

Against Witness: Anti-commemorative Asian/American Poetics

76 Field Trip Against Witness: Anti-­ commemorative Asian/American Poetics A Pile of Past: Lawson Fusao Inada’s Anti-­commemorative Poetics Timothy Yu Cathy Park Hong’s essay “Against Witness” offers a critique of a commonplace about poetry: that its primary political function is to bear witness to historical events. “In an era when eyewitness testimonies, photos, and videos are tweeted seconds after a catastrophe,” Hong (2015) writes, “poetry ’s power to bear witness now feels outdated and inherently passive.” Hong cites the example of Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue,” which became so institutionalized as a poem memorializing the Holocaust that Celan himself wearied of it: “Rather than an act of remembrance, the recitation of ‘Death Fugue’ turned into a mantra to ward off difficult engagement with the past.” Hong calls this a movement from witness to commemoration : “It becomes all pious gesture and drained of meaning. When a poem becomes commemorative, it dies” (Hong 2015). What are the implications of Hong’s critique for Asian American poets ? Many well-­ known Asian American poems are, in fact, grounded in accounts of historical injustices. Perhaps the most prominent example of such injustice is the internment of Japanese Americans by the U.S. government during World War II, a historical trauma evoked by poets such as Janice Mirikitani, Mitsuye Yamada, and Lawson Fusao Inada—­all of whom were themselves interned. One might argue that the history of Japanese American internment has not even reached the level of “commemoration ” in American public awareness that would render its poetry clichéd; many Americans remain ignorant of the facts of internment, and supporters of recent efforts to block refugees and Muslims from entering Field Trip 77 the United States have even cited Japanese American internment as a positive precedent. There is little risk, it would seem, of the American establishment trotting out remembrances of Japanese American internment as a “pious gesture” anytime soon. Nonetheless, many poems of internment do display a consciousness of the risks of commemoration. Such poems do not offer an easily digestible narrative of historical experience, nor do they present a pious moral clarity . Indeed, many complicate the very notion of witness itself by injecting uncertainty into the act of recollection or by refusing to speak for the totality of internee experience. These are anti-­commemorative poems of self-­ critical remembrance, acknowledging the complications of the language of witness while also engaging directly the continuing resistance of audiences to the true historical lessons of internment. Lawson Fusao Inada’s Legends from Camp offers a remarkable, book-­ length example of an anti-­ commemorative poetics. Published in 1993, Legends from Camp is grounded in Inada’s experience of being interned as a child. Yet the very title of the collection signals that something more ambiguous than remembrance or commemoration is at work in these poems. What Inada offers are not “stories” or “experiences” from the internment camps but legends. This may seem a curious choice: a legend is not, after all, usually a story from one’s own experience but a story received from others. Moreover, it is a story whose relationship to historical fact is unclear—­“a traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but not authenticated,” as the Oxford English Dictionary has it. But Inada also plays on a second meaning of legend: an inscription, a piece of writing. His title calls attention to his poems not as transparent acts of witness but as moments of writing, focusing our attention less on historical facts than on linguistic acts. The book’s title sequence is a series of short poems with headings such as “The Legend of Protest” and “The Legend of Flying Boy.” A reader looking to this sequence for a poetry of witness is likely to be disappointed; these brief pieces are understated, telegraphic, and aphoristic, often marked by dry humor. Many of the poems do not have a first-­ person speaker, and many fulfill their title of “legends” by presenting stories that seem to have circulated in camp, overheard rather than directly witnessed. And most are quotidian, chronicling seemingly minor incidents rather than dramatic events. The dramatic title “The Legend of Flying Boy” heads a poem that turns out to...

Dialectics of Aesthetic Politics in Asian American Experimental Poetry

History and society as sedimented content remain mediated in the form of art. Experimental poetry in Asian American literature, I argue, is a striking example. Utilizing Theodor Adorno’s theory, to reveal historically mediated relation between the autonomous form and the politics of colonialism in its content, I select poems written by two Asian American poets: Barbara Jane Reyes’ Poeta en San Francisco and Yunte Huang’s Cribs. I will analyze those poems to unfold how form itself politically mediates history and content and how this mediation illuminates the way poetic form of autonomous Asian-American experimental poems subsumes political meaning contextualized with Western discourse and history of colonialism, imperialism, and so on. Through reading closely Barbara Jane Reyes’ Poeta en San Francisco, this paper argues that the more experimental and autonomous a poem becomes, the more readily it can answer to the complex social and historical problems it is located in. Opaque (post) colonial history in Reyes’ Poeta en San Francisco immanently opposes naiveté as a means but set it as a goal for the virtual utopian semblance in untimely future. Naïve form in poems in Huang’s Cribs is his goal, not his means. The paper concludes that the experimental poems in Asian American literature show the negative dialectics of autonomous form and natural history/social reification in (post)modern society that also expands into the totalizing ideology in (post)modern society where dominance on nature is reproduced on the second nature of people.

Poetic Language as a Sounding Mo'um (Body): Reading Cathy Park Hong's Poems as Deleuze's “Minor Literature”

Poetic Language as a Sounding Mo'um (Body):Reading Cathy Park Hong's Poems as Deleuze's “Minor Literature” Tae Yun Lim (bio) introduction Korean American poet Cathy Park Hong has a unique relationship with the Korean language and culture through her innovative and stylish English verses in Translating Mo'um (2002; hereinafter TM) and Dance Dance Revolution (2007; hereinafter DDR). These books elaborate Hong's “cultural zigzagging,” the re-importation of the English language back to Western culture, and “misplaced cultural bartering” in the imagined city called “the Desert” (Kryah, “Interview”).1 Reading Hong's work in relation to a matrix of French post-structuralist thinkers and phenomenologists reveals that her language can be interpreted as a “minor literature” as described by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and that her work enacts new forms of culturally or ethnically “in-between” or “becoming” ethnic subjectivity. Hong's “minoritized” ways of using language no longer denote the Korean or Asian American subject as a racially and culturally homogeneous subject. Her “minor” language functions as a new cultural lens through which these “in-between” subjects, if only temporarily, reinterpret themselves and the world around them; therefore, Hong's experimental language is an important political tool for these culturally in-between figures. Like many other contemporary Asian American writers, Hong's attitude towards the term “Asian American” is ambivalent. As Song Min Hyoung has noted, Asian American writers and poets in the last three decades, including Hong, are “engaged in actively redefining what it means to be an Asian American … [and] work within a space of tense creativity that reflects a national unease [End Page 83] about the question of race” (14). Eunsong Kim and Don Mee Choi also state that in the contemporary era, Asian Americanness is no longer a manageable or controllable category, as it is comprised of rich and complex genealogies of diverse cultural and racial groups in their manifesto “Refusal=Intervention.” In this regard, the importance of reading contemporary Korean American women poets no longer lies in “their exploration of the complexities of 'Korean' or 'Korean-American' or 'Korean-American woman' as subject positions or as opportunities for constructing even minority/oppositional voices …, [but in] their poem's hostility to these questions” (McNeill 2). Hong's art aesthetic revolving around the pure language—that does not have any fixed semantic referent—and new “becoming” subject is evident in Dance Dance Revolution. The title is derived from the name of a series of music video games produced by a Japanese company. To play this game, the players first choose a pop song and stand on a platform to hit the colored arrows on the screen with their feet to musical cues. Hong titles her work DDR because this process of cultural zigzagging—in which Western pop music and dance moves are imported, made into game formats in Asian countries, gain popularity and are reimported into Western countries, losing their cultural originality—is similar to the ways in which the English language in the contemporary era is losing its original meaning and becoming distorted or transformed under the influence of globalization. The contemporary world is one in which different cultures daily flow across their borders, and so cultural/ethnic identities are continually being disconnected and dislocated by elements from other cultures and languages. No one culture or language now can be truly insulated from another. “The Desert” in Hong's DDR is a microcosm showing how our fast-changing multicultural and multilingual society creates a culturally and racially different (Asian American) subject that has lost its cultural or national originality. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. In DDR, she incorporates elements of the Korean language and culture into her English verses, attempting to construct her “becoming” or “in-between” writing subject. Hong's hybridized language has the creative and transformative force to construct identities beyond conventional notions of nation and culture. Hong uses a hybrid of English and foreign elements, particularly from Korean language and culture, to differentiate her subject from a homogeneous national/cultural identity—but not [End Page 84] entirely. Under the conditions of this transnational or cultural mobility the main character, the Guide, and her use...

Mixing Memory and Science: Kimiko Hahn’s Toxic Flora and the Idea of Home

Toxic Flora (2010) marks a significant departure from Asian American poet Kimiko Hahn’s previous poetry collections in terms of subject matter and form. These poems have their origins in various science articles from the New York Times and serve as meditations on nature and human nature, punctuated with musings by an “I” whose voice seems more mature and quietly confident compared to Hahn’s previous collections. However, when read in the context of her other work, we see that the issues she is most passionate about subjectivity, language, home- continue to weave themselves into the fabric of Toxic Flora. In Toxic Flora, in addition to the usual themes, there is a new intellectual curiosity for things scientific and a strong sense of discovering “In things the most unlike some qualities / Having relationship and family ties” (from Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphrey Davy) as she notes in the epigraph of her book. The poems are grouped into sections with topics running the gamut from insects to birds to planets to extinct species to sea creatures to dinosaurs to the brain, divided by short paragraphs that provide a running commentary on sexual cannibalism. The science articles, which serve as an archive of public memory, are tied to personal memories about family and friends of the poems’ speaker as she “traces analogies” and “fervent geography.” Through these, she gains new ways to organize her life by acknowledging the passage of time: for instance, a past marriage is like an extinct animal; Maui, her mother’s childhood home, becomes a Darwinian locale; her late mother is memorialized in the heavens; and her concerns about her grown daughters alter. Thus, the act of remembering and sorting via science reconfigures family and home for Hahn’s poetic alter ego to redefine herself in the twenty-first century.

Bollaín’s Flores de Otro Mundo via Cathy Song’s Picture Bride: Photographic and Poetic Images Recreate the Art of Forming and Experiencing Community

This article discusses how Spanish filmmaker Iciar Bollain and Asian American poet Cathy Song relate to the art of photography in strikingly similar ways. Both artists show a keen interest in photographs as cultural and as social artifacts. Numerous aspects of photography, both as a material product and as a cultural statement, will be considered, as this article proposes that a storytelling urge becomes summoned every time one chooses to take, pose for, and look at a photograph. In other words, the photographer, the poser, and the spectator cannot escape the desire to construct a story around photography. Both Bollain’s Flores de otro mundo and Song’s Picture Bride show us how every photographic object begets a story that configures a community in the present or to come.

Pseudo-Name: Michael Derrick Hudson as Yi-Fen Chou

Amerasia Journal hosted a roundtable of prominent Asian American poets, scholars, and publishers on the Yi-Fen Chou controversy, in which poet Michael Derrick Hudson adopted a Chinese-appearing penname and was ultimately published in Best American Poetry 2015. The participants offered diverse viewpoints on what it meant for Hudson to write in “yellowface” as Chou, as well as BAP editor Sherman Alexie's continued justifications for his selection of Hudson's poems.

Beyond the Threshold: Unlimiting Risk in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Kiki Smith's Endocrinology

In the mid-1990s, the Asian-American poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, at the time experiencing illness due to pesticide exposure (Chiu), collaborated with the American artist Kiki Smith to produce Endocrinology—a poem-collage featuring lines and fragments of text alongside monoprints resembling organs from the endocrine (hormone) system (e.g. the adrenal glands, a uterus, testicles). Issued in 1997 as a paperback by Kelsey Street Press, Endocrinology was originally published as a fullcolor, limited-edition art book earlier that same year. According to Berssenbrugge, Smith chose a translucent but tough rice paper with which to build the pages of the art book because of its skin-like quality (Hinton). To create the maquette, Berssenbrugge and Smith cut and pasted lines of Berssenbrugge's poetry onto the pages (Berssenbrugge and Smith, “Story and Notes” 106). Originally a fivestanza poem, “Endocrinology” was transformed, Berssenbrugge explains, into a “field or surface tension of words that float across the whole” (106). Using letterpress, silkscreen, and die-cut printing techniques, Universal Limited Art Editions reproduced the maquette—all of its text and images—almost exactly as Berssenbrugge and Smith had originally created it (Hinton). The result was a tactile, dimensional book object—its interior, in the words of Berssenbrugge, an “abstract turmoil” (Hinton). Through this “abstract turmoil,” Endocrinology evokes fluid forms of environmental relation—processes of circulation, permutation, perfusion, absorption, disorganization, mirroring, and

On geographical and metaphorical (fault) lines: Immigration, acculturation and generation gap in South Asian American women’s fiction

In numerous immigrant narratives by South Asian American women writers, the process of immigration is construed as the crossing of a line, or of several lines, to be more specific. The act of crossing the geographical line of the border precedes the crossing of more metaphorical boundaries, for example those between the two cultural scenarios operative in the writers’ native and adopted cultures. In the process, yet another metaphorical line is drawn between first- and second-generation immigrants, two groups that inevitably experience immigration in two completely divergent ways. The purpose of this article is to discuss several literary texts based on the construction of a literal or metaphorical line written by first- and second-generation South Asian American women writers (namely, Meena Alexander, Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Jhumpa Lahiri) to map the different standpoints from which first- and second-generation writers explore the issue of migration. This analysis will be situated in the context of what Meena Alexander, a first-generation South Asian American poet and novelist, terms “fault lines” when she writes in her memoir: “In Manhattan, I am a fissured thing, a body crossed by fault lines” ( Fault Lines 182). The concept of the geological fault line serves as a powerful metaphor for the fractures and discontinuities inherent in the process of immigration that will be discussed in this article.

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Introduction:

They Were Girls: Animality and Poetic Voice in Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal

This essay tracks the reception of the story of the Bengali wolf girls, Amala and Kamala, in the American popular media of the 1940s. I argue that the terms of that decade’s debates are taken on some sixty years later when Bhanu Kapil, an Asian American poet, revisits the wolf girls’ story in her third book, Humanimal [a project for future children] . For commentators in the 1940s, animality is the ground condition for bodily health and normality, but it must also be transcended in order to achieve the normative future. Their analyses of the wolf girl Kamala’s failure to transcend her animality demonstrate the American scientists’ conflation of animality, coloniality, and disability. This same failure, however, makes Kamala valuable to contemporary American poetry’s representation of the nonsubject. Kapil’s poetic form counters the triumphant developmental narrative that American scientists hoped to impose on the wolf girl’s story. Instead, Kapil’s deliberately retrogressive text uses Kamala’s animality to make links between different experiences of animalization across colonial and postcolonial time. Rather than restore the wolf girls to lyric subjectivity and normative selfhood, Kapil inscribes a different relation among language, ethics, and species, creating a poetic form that corresponds to their non- or not-just-human being.