The Burden of Being Burmese

"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 201...