Maw Shein Win
the nats have stolen my hair

mosquito net winds itself around limbs

watch clumps of black hair blow across the room onto balcony

the house on Inya Lake presses down on my neck & back

smell of jackfruit & sweet orange consoles me

eat semolina cake under crackling palms

hear the cousins gossip: she is so idle, not as enterprising as her four sisters
 
 


sometimes I cannot bear to watch these sunsets
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This piece opens the collection as each section begins or ends with a spirit house poem. Qiao Dai writes in the epigraph, “Nats are spirits believed to have the power to influence the everyday life of people in their orbit…small shrines called spirit houses are often placed in a village or even inside or near a worshipper’s house where offerings can be made to the local nat.”

Maw Shein Winon "Spirit House (one)"
Black-and-white panel from Ann Carson's book, The Trojan Women, with Rosanna Bruno
"The Best Recent Poetry—Review Roundup"

Fiona Sampson discusses new releases by Anne Carson, Gillian Clarke, Rachel Boast, Martina Evans, and Andrew McMillan. Of Carson's work, she writes, "At this #MeToo moment protesting against the objectification of women, her Trojan women are drawn as literally animal, the spoils of war, a 'mob of dogs and cows you see downstage […] leftover females.'"

via THE GUARDIAN
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Cover image from Bear Review
What Sparks Poetry:
Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes on Ama Codjoe's "Superpower"


"Each time I read 'Superpower,' I’m astonished by the turns the poem keeps making: from the playful to the horrifying, spanning over a hundred years in a few lines. The poem moves from an imagined fantasy of a superhero, to the folk hero John Henry, to an unnamed enslaved woman, to a (re)imagined memory of the speaker’s mother."
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