Karst Mountains Will Bloom
The Collected Poems of Pos Moua
“In the lush panorama of these poems, Pos Moua intuits the body and the spirit’s deep yearning for home and heaven, for nature and desire, for mountains near and far, for a divine love surpassing this lifetime. At the core is an honest grief acknowledging that all beauty must eventually meet its own exquisite loss. Here is the gorgeous collection of a visionary Hmong poet whose radiant language and natural eloquence has given us the dark and light of his heartscape. For this, we offer admiration in return. We hold these poems close and know to remain hopeful.”
—Der Vang, Afterland, 2016 winner of the Walt Whitman Award
“To read Pos Moua’s poems is to be transformed. At their heart is a timeless wisdom and graceful clarity that poets rarely embody, but he does, poem after poem, from mountains to rivers, from Southeast Asia to California, from love to radiation, from this life to the next. With a personal essay by the poet and contributions from the vital and necessary Hmong American Writers’ Circle, this open-hearted book and the first collected poems from a Hmong American poet is a revelation that every person should read. Karst Mountains Will Bloom is a landmark achievement: ascendant, transcendent, visionary. This poet is a treasure and a light.”
—Lee Herrick, Fresno Poet Laureate, author of Scars and Flowers (2018)
Coyote Logic
by Lisa Dominguez Abrahams
Lisa Dominguez Abrahams’ first book-length collection of poems Coyote Logic is a slim volume filled with stories of self-discovery and family, that are a visceral collaboration of feminism, Latinx origins, sensory celebrations, and fairy tale reimagining of our collective human story. These poems track the passage of people, especially women, especially descendants of brown immigrants, and pull at the threads of survival that makes us who we are.
Blood Transparencies
by Randy White
Blood Transparencies: An Autobiography in Verse is a brutally honest narrative of coming-of-age in a unique American family. Told in a series of poetic vignettes, it details life with a father who believes John Muir’s words more essential than the Bible, often leading his “tribe” on harsh quests into America’s wildernesses. The tale is both humorous and heart breaking. Imagine Odysseus returned from WWII to teach his son the subtle art of bone breaking before sharing hot cocoa and opera. This is a family as at ease with nurturing abandoned wild animals as around a campfire rapt to ancestral stories of cannibalism. Throughout the book there is an occasional photographic relic, or Neolithic scrawl to memorialize the breadth of this human story. There are echoes here too, like the “transparencies” of the title, of mythology and tall tales, an oral tradition transcendent of the printed page. Blood Transparencies is a stunningly fresh glance back, far back, from whence we’ve all come.
Reviews for Blood Transparencies
San Francisco Book Review
Blood Transparencies, an autobiographical poetry collection by Randy White, is an eloquent and poignant look at a life via poetic snapshots. There were several times I had to stop reading; I was so overcome with my own memories that tears of nostalgia blurred my vision.
I found it amusing that the very first poem, "Blood Transparencies," referenced memories being like beads on a thread. Later in the same poem, the transparencies are stunningly referenced as “a perfect fossil of light and dark interred in celluloid.”
"Counted in Sheep Years," was a lovely poem, a beautiful commentary on the nature our relationship with one of our earliest domesticates. It starts with a stanza encapsulating millennia, then goes on to detail one family's interactions with young children growing up with and among the sheep.
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I felt ‘Dante’s Children' is among the best of the collection. It woke memories in me of visiting my great-grandmother, who was suffering from dementia. Highly recommended. Such phrasing! White is a masterful artist, painting beauty with words. These poems will draw out your own memories, bringing tears of joy, tears of pain, tears of remembrance for history now faded to the past.
Reviewed by J. Aislynn d'Merricksson
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Kirkus Indie Review
White (Motherlode/La Veta Madre, 1977), whose work has appeared in several literary magazines, uses the metaphor of a slideshow in the title poem to link the author’s personal history with the outdoor landscape. In it, family snapshots, ethereally illuminated and projected on a bedsheet screen, are as eternal as fossils; the father’s narration gives substance to the passing moments captured in the photos. The author links this powerful image to the flickering light that illuminates cave art and to Oklahoma red-dirt furrows “full of sunset.” Yet darkness waits in “the pause between slides”—a darkness that is, like a lightbulb-battering moth, “drawn to the brief incandescence / of our lives.” One could also see the slideshow as a metaphor for poetry, which similarly captures moments through illumination and language—often with darkness in the pauses. This poetic autobiography relates a childhood in the West, where wild nature granted blessings but could be harsh—like the game-warden father in “Wrestling Odysseus,” who teaches his son how to wrestle: “My mother leaves the room, my sisters begin to cry.... // There is no honor, no prize of arms to win in this, / no lesson here but fury.” More Less
Manhattan Book Review
Choosing verse to write his autobiography Blood Transparencies, as opposed to prose, was both interesting and risky. When writing an autobiography in verse, it can be difficult to grasp the concepts and life of this person. This was the case for me. I enjoyed reading individual poems by White, such as “Wearing the Bear,” “Dante’s Children,” and “I Dream of Jeanie”. They formed a visual picture from the author’s past to the mind’s eye. This book is one that really needs to be read in one sitting so that readers can appreciate the story of his life. I found the times I was able to read for longer periods, I enjoyed the book more. Despite having difficulty following this book as a true autobiography, it is obvious that White is a gifted writer. Overall, an intriguing way of writing an autobiography.
Reviewed by Amy Synoracki
How Do I Begin?
A Hmong American Literary Anthology
Hmong history and culture can be found in the form of oral stories, oral poetry, textile art, and music but there is no written account of Hmong life, by a Hmong hand, passed down through the centuries. As an undergraduate, Burlee Vang experienced this void when he received valuable advice from his English professor: “Write about your people. That story has not been told. If you don’t, who will?”
How Do I Begin? is the struggle to preserve on paper the Hmong American experience. In this anthology, readers will find elaborate soul-calling ceremonies, a woman questioning the seeming tyranny of her parents and future in-laws, the temptation of gangs and drugs, and the shame and embarrassment of being different in a culture that obsessively values homogeneity. Some pieces revisit the ghosts of war. Others lament the loss of a country. Many offer glimpses into intergenerational tensions exacerbated by the differences in Hmong and American culture.
Heyday’s How Do I Begin? signifies a turning point for the Hmong community, a group of people who have persevered through war, persecution, and exile. Transcending ethnic and geographic boundaries, it poignantly speaks of survival instead of defeat.
Reviews for How Do I Begin?
“Seventeen Hmong come-of-age writers meet you head-on with their hearts on fire, their eyes electric, their voices thundering: bullet-riddled histories, miraculous border-breakouts, adopted fractured citizenships, landscapes in spirit flight, language in between languages, and impossible healings of community, and perhaps one of the finest collections of creative writing in decades. A monumental tour de force.”
—Juan Felipe Herrera, Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair, UC Riverside
“The confident clear Americano speech tells frankly of the anxieties and questions around being Hmong, new Americans, and artists, with diverse and ever-shifting resolutions. We are witnessing creation.”