A renowned editor and translator of contemporary Burmese writing, this volume by Ko Ko Thett is the first major single-volume collection to appear in English by a contemporary Burmese poet. His poetry explores the possibility of the translatability of experience between the personal and the political, and the possibility of the mutual transferabilities between languages as disparate as Burmese and English.
Ko Ko Thett is a poet by choice and a Burmese by chance. The poems in this collection, many of which have appeared in English-language literary magazines worldwide, range from “faddish sugar crystals,” written in Burmese for his 1996 illegal campus chapbook at the Yangon Institute of Technology, to his autumn 2014 “anxiety attack” at the University of Leuven. Apart from his own work as a writer and translator, he is the co-editor and translator of the seminal volume Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets, (ARC, 2012; Northern Illinois University Press 2013).
"Thett circles themes of interconnection, history, destiny, and translatability. He defines the burden of being Burmese through a deep and expansive dive into the quotidian particulars of life as a Burmese national, an expat, a political person, and a poet." — Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers, Los Angeles Review
Listen to a bilingual reading of poems with ko ko thett, Maw Shein Win, Qiao Dai, and Prof. Penny Edwards, sponsored by the UC Berkeley Burmese language program:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1Enptkgpag
Click here for more information about Ko Ko Thett and his 2022 collection, Bamboophobia.
