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A deconstruction of the stereotypical depictions of the coolie in the British Empire.
"City of Pearls is one continuous gift-giver. Sham-e-Ali Nayeem lusciously, unselfishly and most certainly, unapologetically shares with us the magic and glory of story. Stories made from lived lives...full with words and images that speak of...place, purpose, father, family, fragility, strength, beauty, suffering, celebration. Stories to hold us tight...and inspire us to continue dreaming through it all." --Ursula Rucker, author of Supa Sista "I was brought back to the landscapes of my childhood by these sensitive poems. So quietly but firmly do they evoke not only the shattered rocks of Hyderabad but also the ways in which some of us live perpetually between, belong neither to one place no...
Ramlochan's poems take the reader through a series of imaginative narratives that are at once emotionally familiar and compelling, even as the characters evoked and the happenings they describe are heavily symbolic. Her poems reference the language and structural patterns of the genres of fantasy or speculative fiction, though with her own distinctive features, including the presence of such folkloric Trinidadian figures as the Duenne, those wandering lost spirits whose feet point backwards.
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Explores the contemporary history of Lebanon, scarred by civil war. Here, the author asks if and when experiences of a guerilla war can ever be documented.
Thousand Star Hotel confronts the silence around racism, police brutality, and the invisibility of the Asian American urban poor. From "with thanks to Sahra Nguyen for the refugee style slogan": They give the kids candy to bet. My daughter loses the first four rounds, she's a quiet wire as they take her candy away, piece by piece. When she finally wins, I ask if she wants to play again. No! she shouts, grabbing her candy, I want to go home! True refugee style: take everything you got and run with it. Bao Phi is a National Poetry Slam finalist.
The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2020 Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 NPR's Best Books of 2020 National Book Award in Poetry, Longlist Frank Sanchez Book Award After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. In Obit, Chang writes of “the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.” These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died (“civility,” “language,” “the future,” “Mother’s blue dress”) and the cultural impact of death on the living. Whereas elegy atte...
"Cracks open a blueswoman's purse of poem and songs, bursting folk poetry for the millennium. Lush, lively smak-talk pulsates with jazz cadences, afrofuturistic impulses, and recollections of epic women. These poems holler, scat, chant, and eulogize on their way to the midwife, sometimes by bus, sometimes on foot, always on time"--
An electric tale of apocalypse, sex and time travel from one of the Caribbean's most extraordinary cultural figures.
In 1903 a Brahmin woman sailed from India to Guyana as a ‘coolie’, the name the British gave to the million indentured labourers they recruited for sugar plantations worldwide after slavery ended. The woman, who claimed no husband, was pregnant and travelling alone. A century later, her great-granddaughter embarks on a journey into the past, hoping to solve a mystery: what made her leave her country? And had she also left behind a man? Gaiutra Bahadur, an American journalist, pursues traces of her great-grandmother over three continents. She also excavates the repressed history of some quarter of a million female coolies. Disparaged as fallen, many were runaways, widows or outcasts, and ...