Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Barbara Jane Reyes, and Craig Santos Perez probe the identities of the outcast, the displaced in poems that experiment with everything from internet news sources to the Book of Genesis and Tagalog tradition. In Diwata, Reyes inherits the responsibility of remembering from her grandfather, a survivor of World War II and the Bataan Death March, in a collection that, according to Nick Carbo, “would have raised the hairs on the nape of Emily Dickinson’s head.” Lee, whose words Brenda Iijima says “full of finesse, radiance and are unsettlingly real,” reads from Underground National, an experiment across the DMZ. Perez’s latest book, from unincorporated territory [saina],illuminates the history of the Chamorro, the native people of Guam, in lyrics of personal and political memory. The SF Examiner says “It is impossible to read [saina] and not feel moved by Perez’s capacity to take pain and truths that should be embittering, even crippling, and fashion light out of them.”
Barbara Jane Reyes is author of two previous poetry collections including Poeta enSan Francisco which was awarded the 2005 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She was born in Manila and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She works as adjunct professor in Philippine Studies atUniversity of San Francisco.
Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guahan (Guam), is the co-founder of Achiote Press and author of two poetry books: from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008) and from unincorporated territory [saina] (Omnidawn Publishing, 2010). He received the Poets & Writers California Writer’s Exchange Award in 2010. He earned an MFA from the University of San Francisco and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Sueyeun Juliette Lee grew up 3 miles from the CIA. She is a poet, scholar, and editor. Currently, she lives in Philadelphia where she edits Corollary Press, a chapbook series devoted to multi-ethnic, innovative writing. Her first collection of poems, That Gorgeous Feeling (Coconut Press), is a study of celebrity and the Asian figure in mass media. Her second collection, Underground National (Factory School), explores how national structures and identities affect human psyches, taking Korea as its primary staging ground.
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