Poetry Potluck III (ft. Emily Yoon, Wo Chan, Sueyen Juliette Lee, & Kristin Chang)

10/17/18 • 59 min

AAWW Radio: New Asian American Writers & Literature

We’re bringing you another episode of Poetry Potluck featuring audio from our favorite AAWW poetry events and showcasing exciting poets of the moment. In Poetry Potluck 3, we celebrate Emily Jungmin Yoon’s debut collection of poetry, A Cruelty Special to our Species. As the Poetry editor for The Margins, Emily has cultivated a special home for Asian American poetry in all its richness, and we’re thrilled to celebrate her collection.

Emily Jungmin Yoon collects testimony and confronts history in her debut collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species. The poems in this book are records of earthly and human violence—the sexual slavery of Korean comfort women, lives lost during natural disasters, and the everyday, accumulating ways that women hurt and are made to silently accept that pain. These are poems deeply invested in the minutiae of language, how one word leads to the next, connecting sound, rhythm, and meaning between languages, poets, and women.

She has invited three poets to read alongside her; Wo Chan, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, and Kristin Chang. They read poems about friendship on mushrooms, a roast duck elegy to restaurant families, and environmental erotica about condensation.

Here’s programs assistant Tiffany Tran Le, who introduces each writer. Thanks for listening.

Here’s programs assistant Tiffany Tran Le, who introduces each writer. Thanks for listening.

Previous Episode

Poetry Potluck II (ft. Fatimah Asghar & Vivek Shraya)

In Poetry Potluck 2, we have Vivek Shraya and Fatimah Asghar, who read from their poetry books I’m Afraid of Men and If They Come For Us.

In Vivek Shraya’s I’m Afraid of Men, she explores how masculinity was imposed on her as a boy and continues to haunt her as a girl, and contemplates how we might reimagine gender for the twenty-first century. Vanity Fair writes, “Vivek Shraya transforms her long-festering fears of men into cultural rocket fuel ... Shraya’s dispatches from the frontlines of life as a queer, trans woman of color are frequently illuminating, painfully honest, and, in spite of everything, hopeful.”

If They Come For Us is Fatimah Asghar’s debut poetry collection, where she captures her experience as a Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America, exploring identity, inheritance, and healing. The Library Journal writes, “Her story sweeps wide, becoming the history of India, Partition, genocidal hatred, and timeless misogyny. In the telling, she moves freely in form.”

Next Episode

Disability Justice (ft. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha & Cyrée Jarelle Johnson)

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice outlines what it means to create spaces by and for sick and disabled queer people of color. In this episode of AAWW Radio, Leah reads from her essay collection and then has a conversation with Cyrée Jarelle Johnson about meaningful inclusion of disability justice, Intersectional disability, the nuances and multitudes of the disability experiences, and “crip wealth.”