The story gets its sweetness from the detail of catastrophe

The memories of springs and summers blend, fade, / like lyrics, movie scenes, people I never really knew.

In my right hand, a monsoon to rain the year away / In my left, a poem to wash yourself clean.

Relaunching the Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities column with a conversation with the author of Concentrate.

The estimate comes down to six hundred missing,/ the estimate comes to a son flying off a bridge.

سۈڭەكلەر قىرىلىپ، ئۇۋىلىپ ھەتتا، / تەجىرىخانىدا ئەگىسە روھىم |
Even as my bones are scraped and rubbed / my spirit circles where this work is done

On the urgency of remembering the fourteen years of Ferdinand E. Marcos, Sr.’s military-backed dictatorship in the Philippines

Fourteen pieces on history and the past

Former programs associate Nadia Q. Ahmad on work, rest, and AAWW’s fabled green couch

Former art director Britt Gudas recalls being on duty at the Workshop

Looking back at 9/11 and the Fall 2011 issue of the Asian American Literary Review

when does / a door become / a door , as it opens / or when it closes , / revealing an entirety – its face / or a fixed movement / of its hinges , is that smiling / or saying goodbye , / moonlight / or memory.  

For eleven / years I lied about where I’m from, / ashamed by the music of endings, // that deep hollow bell. How much of my yearly / tax is spent to bomb the dirt / that birthed me?, is a question // I never wanted to consider.

‘Children are playing soldier. / Fetuses ripped from wombs dangle / in nearby trees. Yet he opened his mouth / and a flood of love melodies poured out.’

but this is boring. let’s talk / about something else. people are only lines / written with water it’s not that serious. i just want to drink / my coffee. i just want to think about roses i misheard / the words as a laugh, beautiful like a song of roses

At this point I will disobey and say / you are free to go if you choose. Choice is a complicated part of describing / Palestinian heroes or terrorists.

Christine Hyung-Oak Lee talks about her new memoir, the restorative power of writing, the doubling that haunts her life, and why Slaughterhouse-Five is a permanent part of her mind.

‘First memory of English: my father orders spaghetti from a waitress. / Foreign flowers blossom in his mouth and I’m spellbound in Urdu. // On Friday afternoons, cars spill across a bleached suburb. / Not far from the mosque, look! Crooked lines of devout Urdu.’

There are no refractions today / by the pepper flakes— in the glass. // The snails slept by the snap pea hooks / and cradles— I salted them. // Sometimes I drank / from a vapored gas— / I made ellipses with my glass.

‘A family as triangle. Drifting lines. This [mother- father-child] triangle will never be reassembled.’

‘No others no-place/what to do but hoard the remaining solaces’

The novelist talks about his favorite samurai movies, the violence of imperialism, and his struggle to remember Japan

An interview with Akhil Sharma, author of Family Life, on how to write a novel that has no plot, literary modernism’s influence, and remembering India

Remembering Agha Shahid Ali, 12 years after his passing

Notes for a hypothetical interview with the author re: Taipei, living in the present, memory, moral responsibility, technology, zen, etc.

Fellow sci-fi writer Vandana Singh quizzes the award-winning, short-fiction master on his axiomatic approaches, paradigm shifts, and whether he would ever own a digient.