The Burden of Being Burmese

by Ko Ko Thett

Overview

"The Burden of Being Burmese displays an extraordinary fertile and febrile imagination—one that will both delight and disturb American readers."—Marjorie Perloff

"A brilliantly off-kilter book."—John Ashbery

Ko Ko Thett writes that he is "a poet by choice and a Burmese by chance." The poems in this collection—the first major volume in English by a contemporary Burmese poet—range from "faddish sugar crystals," written in Burmese for his 1996 illegal campus chapbook in Yangon, to his autumn 2014 "anxiety attack" in the Netherlands, where he now lives. Thett is the co-editor and translator of the seminal volume Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938890161
Publisher:	Zephyr Press
Publication date:	09/15/2015
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ko Ko Thett is a poet by choice and a Burmese by chance. The poems in this collection, many of which have appeared in English-language literary magazines worldwide, range from “faddish sugar crystals,” written in Burmese for his 1996 illegal campus chapbook at the Yangon Institute of Technology, to his autumn 2014 “anxiety attack” at the University of Leuven. Apart from his own work as a writer and translator, he is the co-editor and translator of the seminal volume Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets, (ARC, 2012; Northern Illinois UniversityPress 2013).

Table of Contents

3 to the navel of the earth
6 panning for alluvial gold [at the confluence of her dreams]
8 bullhorns in the passing lane
10 a few ways to eat a city raw
13 the boomtown
15 chaos clock
19 welcome to the fort town of ba htoo
21 lawksawk
24 neue donau [the new danube]
26 akdeniz [the white sea]
28 urban renewal
30 faddish sugar crystals
31 permanent installations
34 coup d’état
35 sad [seasonal affective disorder]
36 lady’s fingers
37 how to roast an osturducken [and get away with it]
38 i swim
39 fuck me untied
41 after “the lie of art”
43 hallowe’en
45 blindfolded brahmins
48 a walk with history
50 myanma: a collage
53 cut
55 my generation is best
57 no football color
58 timely applause and toothy smiles
59 corpse flower blooms in washington
60 the mandalay gazette 1885
62 pyongyang people’s daily
64 child corpses
66 the 5000th
69 i told you there’s a fire
71 the rain maker
73 anxiety attack
75 f a i t h s u p p e r
76 the burden of being bama
78 no romance love
79 the day he regretted swimming butterfly
[across the baltic with a beer can in his hand]
80 strawman story
81 strawman [in re-verse]
82 i’ve seen death
85 water elephant
86 monosodium glutamate
88 monsoon
89 encomium for mr. yew
91 cuban fish-head soup

93 Notes
101 Afterword