Bøger udgivet af Muae Publishing (Kaya)

A new book-length elegy from San Diego's 2023-24 Poet LaureateJason Magabo Perez's second full-length book of poetry is an extended elegy set in the alleyways and Pacific-bound boulevards of San Diego, California during the current global health crisis. Called "an antidote to despair" (Muriel Leung, Imagine Us, The Swarm) and poetry that "complicates notions of solidarity, community and justice, distilling the quotidian into something sacred" (Rachelle Cruz, God's Will For Monsters), I ask about what falls away serves as an intimate grief manifesto against the daily violations of racial capitalism. Perez, the 2023-2024 San Diego Poet Laureate, employs a critical and improvisatory assemblage of lyric and litany, narrative and distillation, fragment and refrain to map city, solidarity and history. At once playful and tenacious, I ask about what falls away pays careful witness to working-class uncles, aunties, cousins and youth in rhythm with the anti-colonial wisdom of writers such as Neferti X. M. Tadiar and Aimé Césaire, remixing sorrow with a deep love and knowledge for everyday people.

Crevasse, Hong Kong-based writer Nicholas Wong's newest collection of poetry, which won the 2016 Lamda Literary Award, starts with an epigraph from Maurice Merleau-Ponty that notes the impossibility of observing one's own physical body and, therefore, the necessity of a "second," "unobservable" body from which to view one's own. The poems in Crevasse seek to uncover the thread connecting these mutually observed and observing bodies. Like Samuel Beckett and others before him, Wong has deliberately chosen to write in a non-native language--English, his second language after Cantonese. Freed from the assumptions and conventions of his mother tongue, Wong strips down, interrogates and ultimately reorients the fragmented complexities of the multiple communities he inhabits--queer, Asian, poet, reader, lover--in a collection of poems that exposes the gap between familiarity and the inevitable distance of the body.

From Kimiko Hahn, the celebrated poet of Earshot, The Unbearable Heart is a superbly composed and passionate book on grief and mourning. The poems are both formally innovative and openly cathartic, individually and collectively compelling, turning on their own axis as they revolve around one another. They span languages, landscapes cultures and perspectives. In The Unbearable Heart, Hahn examines the everchanging meaning of surviving the death of a loved one. This collection is a palpable moving mediation on life, death and their aftermath.