Nests and Strangers

Book excerpt: Literary Nonfiction. Cultural Writing. Poetry. Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. "What is an avant- garde Asian American Poetic?" NESTS AND STRANGERS: ON ASIAN AMERICAN WOMEN POETS offers an investigation into the contextual identities of diaspora, sound, and the materiality of objectification found both in and on the body through the possibilities of language and page. Essayists Sarah Dowling, Merle Woo, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, and Dorothy Wang provide a critical framework on the life, works, politics, and poetics of Asian American poets Nellie Wong, Myung Mi Kim, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Bhanu Kapil, four authors whose bodies of work represent the full range of Asian American poetry written since the 1970s. Authors include: Sarah Dowling, Merle Woo, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Dorothy Wang, and Mg Roberts. "What I first thought would be a coincidental combination of very different poets and poetries unexpectedly reveals a logical trajectory from twentieth-century Asian American activism to radically innovative poetry. These poets don't just defy erasure or silencing of their individual or chosen- as-collective identities-they create and re-create selves unimaginable to those who would have subsumed their voices. The terms 'Asian American' or 'Asian American poetry' can be unsatisfactory for reducing difference. But after reading this collection, I actually opened myself up to the possibility of accepting the label: 'Asian American woman poet.'" Eileen R. Tabios "Encompassing an impressively wide range of poetic strategies and orientations within what might seem a narrow category, this lively collection of essays explores a group of Asian American women poets bonded together by a groundbreaking small press whose expansive vision offered a stage on which new, challenging forms might emerge. In so doing, these essays participate in a celebration that is both timely and well deserved." Joseph Jonghyun Jeon "This urgently needed collection of essays offers new readings of the poetry of Nellie Wong, Myung Mi Kim, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Bhanu Kapil as engaged with what Sarah Dowling, in an essay on Kim, calls 'the problem of how one becomes, or is prevented from becoming, a subject over time.' As the title implies, NESTS AND STRANGERS both highlights the aesthetic heterogeneity of poetry by Asian American women while at the same time acknowledging conditions of subjection that inform the poets' political commitments and make intricate forms of intimacy and embodied perception possible in the writing." Chris Chen"