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New Books for You to Read

Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing

Edited by Shirley Geok-lim and Cheng Lok Chua

New Rivers Press, 243 pgs

Representing voices from Myanmar to the Philippines, this is the first anthology that connects the multitudes of Southeast Asia to the chaos of America. The Tilting editors emphasize the idea that Southeast Asian Americans give a slightly different twist to the immigrant experience — the American experience — with their Chinese or Indian lineages, British-French-Spanish colonial influences and refugee voices. The best thing about a book like this are the gems you discover when you flip through the pages, like Ahn Phuong-Nguyen’s “You Bring out the Vietnamese Woman in Me,” a fierce spoken-word style poem that you must read out loud: “You bring out the Vietcong in me./ The do what we do even if it’s wrong in me./ The grenade in palm in me./ The untrained assassin in me.”

Barefoot Gen Volume 3: Life After the Bomb

Keiji Nakazawa

Last Gasp of San Francisco, 164 pgs

The third collection of Keiji Nakazawa’s auto-biographical cartoon narrative of life after the bombing of Hiroshima continues to punch straight into the gut. Nakazawa’s spare, driving art and dialogue were not created for entertainment, but instead “out of the author’s desperate need to communicate... so that those of us who have never known war might understand.” Part three begins with Gen digging up the rubble of his house to find out if his father, brother and sister are still alive. The flashbacks of Gen’s younger brother screaming from the burning remains of the house are intensely heart-wrenching, as are the three pages of Gen and his mother weeping over the bucket of bones that were once their loved ones. At its core, Gen is a tribute to survival and hope. Some 60 years after the tragedy, Barefoot Gen continues to be a strong statement against the proliferation of nuclear arms and war in general.

Night Artillery

Anurima Banerji

TSAR Publications, 60 pgs

Full of scars, tongues, blood, bones and languorous movement, Banerji’s poems are like bathing in honey — a slow, sensual drowning. She mixes lush words with concepts from classical Indian music, Persian mysticism and Hindu mythology. You need to keep this book by your bed, to wake up your lover in the middle of the night with lines like “A robe of hair, undone. A turn of wrist, undressed.” But then, like her startling recurring images of cutting shards of ice in hot poems, her work goes from veiled whispers to wild shouts of empowerment. “yes, i have a cobra tongue/ and my third eye will strike/ but no/ my vagina is not/ the passage to india.” Banerji proves exquisitely that being a South Asian women encompasses both the seductiveness of down-turned eyes and the fiery rage of Kali.