Poetry

Each year's anthology consists of 75 poems from the previous calendar year.

Poetry by Asian American authors, including Sadakichi Hartman, Yone Noguchi, Jun Fujita, Wen I-To, Masao Handa, H.T. Tsiang, Bunichi Kagawa, Moon Kwan, Toyo Suyemoto, Hisaye Yamamoto, Charles Yu, Jose Garcia Villa, Diana Chang, Carlos Bulosan, Sojin Takei, Iwao Kawakami, Keiho Soga, Fred Wah, Suniti Namjoshi, Joy Kogawa, Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn, Chandra G.S. Sharat, Wong May, M. Lakshmi Gill, Lawson Inada, and Yuki Hartman.

In the wake of September 11th, Muslim women in the West found themselves more marginalized than ever by a panicked discourse that did little to promote a true understanding of Islam or the Islamic world. Here, in this ambitious volume that includes essays, poetry, fiction, memoir, plays, and artwork, Muslim women speak for themselves, revealing a complexity of experience and thought that escapes most Western portrayals.

While accommodating playfulness and even a bit of audacity, both psychoanalysis and poetry deeply respect formality of structure, nuance of affect, and the multifaceted resonance of the spoken word. Twinship of the analytic and poetic discourse is also evident in the parallels between a fumbling pause in free associations and an aching line break in a poem, a telling parapraxis and an inspired metaphor, an acknowledgment of the repressed via its negation and the irony of simultaneous hiding and revealing in verse, and so on. To put it bluntly, psychoanalysis is two-person poetry and poetry one-p.