Baby Book

By Amy Ching-Yan Lam

"God is personal," the astrologer said. Terrifying and also personal, like a baby.

Direct and humorous, Baby Book stacks story upon story to explore how beliefs are first formed. From a family vacation on a discount bus tour to a cosmogony based on cheese, these poems accumulate ... Read more

Chinatown Ghosts

By Jim Wong-Chu

Jim Wong-Chu is a legend in the Asian Canadian writing community. As founder of the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop (and its magazine Ricepaper), he constantly encouraged and inspired writers across the country to get their work published and acknowledged, from Paul Yee and ... Read more

Chinese Blue

By Weyman Chan

Drawing on more than two thousand years of ancient Chinese tradition that present diverse philosophical modes of being, whether it be the spiritual teachings of Kong Zi or Lao Tzu, the military dicta of Sun Tzu or the complex sensibilities expressed by poets such as Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju, ... Read more

Dream of Me as Water

By David Ly

Moving beyond the themes of race, identity, and personhood navigated in Mythical Man, David Ly’s second book of poetry, Dream of Me as Water, explores ways of being that are not beholden to the expectations of others. Using water as his central metaphor, Ly meditates on how ... Read more

Enough To Be Mortal Now

By Rienzi Crusz

In his most recent volume of poetry, Rienzi Crusz's preoccupations have not substantially changed, but his perspectives have shifted. Still deeply conscious of time and place, here he concerns himself with broader existential concerns, with love and hope, and tragedy, death, ... Read more

Fire Cider Rain

By Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin

Poetry that navigates the science of cold waterways to consider the warmth of the poet’s Chinese-Mauritian family ties

Fire Cider Rain is about the limits to which shared cultural and geographic histories can hold a family together. It follows the lives of three Chinese-Mauritian ... Read more

Flesh, Tongue

By Yaya Yao

In this brilliant and provocative first collection, Yaya Yao confronts her inherited fragmented self and her hunger for a home, using scraps of personal and communal memory to bridge languages, worldviews, and physical distance from her ancestral homeland. Bits of Cantonese, ... Read more

Four Sufferings, The

By Terry Watada

Shiku hakku in Japanese means to endure, an expression that originates in Buddhism. This collection links Terry Watada's past and present while acknowledging the fundamental suffering of human existence--in birth, aging, illness, and death--and the suffering endured in daily ... Read more

Hsin

By Nanci Lee

Nanci Lee's debut explores 4th Century Su Hui's palindrome of longing. Hsin arises from an ancient Chinese ethical philosophy, less a set of moral standards than an appeal to tune.

Heart-mind and nothingness are fair English translations of Hsin, but their tidiness risks losing ... Read more

Kabir's Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets

By Ayaz Pirani

Step into the crater of East Africa and meet the grain of sand from Sindh. Taste the pearls from Indian Ismaili ginans and attend to the True Guru.

Aglow with postcolonial loss, wryly defiant of what they reveal, the poems in Kabir's Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets describe a warm ... Read more