Longlisted for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize • A Best Book of 2024: Time, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage, The Sunday Times (London)
“Remarkable…Compelling…Fine and taut…Indelible.” —The New York Times • “Moving, unnerving, and deeply sexy.” —Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl with the Pearl Earring • “A brilliant debut, as multi-faceted as a gem.” —Kirkus Reviews
A “razor-sharp, perfectly plotted” (The Sunday Times, London) tale of desire, suspicion, and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the summer of 1961—a powerful exploration of the legacy of…
One of the great international writers of our time, Bei Dao, who has suffered serious health setbacks, writes one of his-- and perhaps his most-- powerful books of poems as he looks back-- much as Pound did in the Pisan Cantos-- on his life.
Sidetracks, Bei Dao's first new collection in almost fifteen years, is also the poet's first long poem and his magnum opus-the artistic culmination of a lifetime devoted to the renewal and reinvention of language. "As a poet, I am always lost," Bei Dao once said. Opening with a prologue of heavenly questions and followed by thirty-four cantos, Sidetracks travels forward and backward along the divergent paths of the poet's wandering life-from his time as a Young Pioneer in Beijing, through the…
One of our most powerful contemporary poets, whose work blends the personal with the international, performance with text, Don Mee Choi explores with ferocity and imagination the politics of language, war, history, and intimacy.
Elegiac and haunting, Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi completes the KOR-US trilogy, along with Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016) and the National Book Award-winning DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020).
Much like Proust's madeleine, a spinning Mercedez Benz ring outside Choi's Berlin window prompts a memory of her father on the Glienicker Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which in turn becomes catalyst for delving into the violent colonial and neocolonial contemporary history of South Korea, with particular attention to the horrors of the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980. Here, photographs, news footage, and cultural artifacts comingle with a poetry of…
In just a few years, Gander lost his wife, the poet CD Wright, his mother, and his younger sister. Ungrounded, he accepted the invitation of a new immigrant to this country to hike California’s San Andreas Fault. Gander, who trained as a geologist, found it to be meditative at first—a secular version of walking the stations of the cross. Eventually, they passed through the desolate Mojave Desert town where Gander was born.
As the present mixed with his memories, he began to see the parallel between the rift inside and outside of him. He found himself correlating his tumultuous emotions and the stricken landscape with other divisions, the fractures, and folds that underlie not only this country but any self in its relationship with others.
