Product Details
- Publisher : McClelland & Stewart (May 2 2023)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 72 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0771004745
- ISBN-13 : 9780771004742
- Item weight : 96 g
- Dimensions : 17.2 x 0.53 x 17.15 cm
A beautiful re-issued edition of poetry from the Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author of How To Pronounce Knife
FEATURING A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR
“In 1978, my parents lived in building #48. Nong Khai, Thailand, a Lao refugee camp. My father kept a scrapbook filled with doodles, addresses, postage stamps, maps, measurements. He threw it out and when he did, I took it and found this.”
Built out of doodles, diagrams, and drawings, this is a work characterized by the elegance and power of its bareness. These poems use blank spaces and small print. Their language is exquisitely precise in detail, and every letter, gesture, break, line, and shape becomes a place of real meaning. Here, the intention is to let us see, as well as to hold back much of what we see.
First published in 2007, Souvankham Thammavongsa's remarkable second collection was acclaimed for its originality and cemented her reputation as a poet with a rare, astonishing gift.
FEATURING A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR
“In 1978, my parents lived in building #48. Nong Khai, Thailand, a Lao refugee camp. My father kept a scrapbook filled with doodles, addresses, postage stamps, maps, measurements. He threw it out and when he did, I took it and found this.”
Built out of doodles, diagrams, and drawings, this is a work characterized by the elegance and power of its bareness. These poems use blank spaces and small print. Their language is exquisitely precise in detail, and every letter, gesture, break, line, and shape becomes a place of real meaning. Here, the intention is to let us see, as well as to hold back much of what we see.
First published in 2007, Souvankham Thammavongsa's remarkable second collection was acclaimed for its originality and cemented her reputation as a poet with a rare, astonishing gift.
About Author
SOUVANKHAM THAMMAVONGSA's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Best American Non-Required Reading, The Journey Prize Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Her debut book of fiction, How to Pronounce Knife, won the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Trillium Book Award, and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN America Open Book Award, the Danuta Gleed Award, and one of Time's Must-Read Books of 2020. The title story was a finalist for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Thammavongsa is also the author of four poetry books: Light, winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry; Found; Small Arguments, winner of the ReLit Award; and, most recently, Cluster, which was named a finalist for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, she was raised and educated in Toronto, where she is at work on her first novel.
