Bodega : poems

Select an Action

Title:

Bodega : poems

Author:

Hwang, Su, author.

Uniform Title:

Poems. Selections

ISBN:

9781571315243

Edition:

1st ed.

Physical Description:

94 pages ; 22 cm.

General Note:

Includes a poem translated into Korean by poet Emily Jungmin Yoon.

Contents:

Something of a proverb on luck -- Instant scratch off -- Graveyard shift -- An immigrant's elegy -- Fresh off the boat : an iconography -- Latchkeys -- To infinity & beyond -- Accumulation -- 1.5 proof -- Eomma -- Corner store still : life -- Excavation -- Han -- Portrait of ladymothering -- American seismology -- Hopscotch -- Flushingqueens -- Conjure : daughter -- Show me where it hurts -- When streets are paved with gold -- Assimilation bouquet -- Fresh off the boat : five sonnets -- Jesus -- Migratory patterns -- Store credit -- Bodega -- Wabi-sabi -- Sestina of Koreatown burning -- Reappearing acts of disappearing completely -- Han -- Fault lines -- The price of rice -- Duende essays -- Subtraction theory -- Face : off -- Hosanna Dry Cleaners -- Cancer -- Witness marks -- Masters of re : invention -- Fatherland triptych -- Han -- Saranghaeyo -- Leisure world -- Sunchoke.

Subject Term:

American poetry -- 21st century.

Korean language materials -- Bilingual.

Genre:

Poetry

Summary:

Against the backdrop of the war on drugs and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, a Korean girl comes of age in her parents' bodega in the Queensbridge projects, offering a singular perspective on our nation of immigrants and the tensions pulsing in the margins where they live and work.

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove)	811.6 HWA	Searching... Unknown
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury)	811.6 HWA	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Finalist for the 2021 Kate Tufts Discovery Award

Winner of the 2020 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry

In Su Hwang's rich lyrical and narrative poetics, the bodega and its surrounding neighborhoods are cast not as mere setting, but as an ecosystem of human interactions where a dollar passed from one stranger to another is an act of peaceful revolution, and desperate acts of violence are "the price / of doing business in the projects where we / were trapped inside human cages--binding us / in a strange circus where atoms of haves / and have-nots always forcefully collide." These poems also reveal stark contrasts in the domestic lives of immigrants, as the speaker's own family must navigate the many personal, cultural, and generational chasms that arise from having to assume a hyphenated identity--lending a voice to the traumatic toll invisibility, assimilation, and sacrifice take on so many pursuing the American Dream.

"We each suffer alone in / tandem," Hwang declares, but in Bodega, she has written an antidote to this solitary hurt--an incisive poetic debut that acknowledges and gives shape to anguish as much as it cherishes human life, suggesting frameworks for how we might collectively move forward with awareness and compassion.

Author Notes

Born in Seoul, Korea, Su Hwang was raised in New York, then called the Bay Area home before transplanting to the Midwest, where she received her MFA in poetry from the University of Minnesota. Hwang is a recipient of the inaugural Jerome Hill Fellowship in Literature, the Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize, and writer-in-residence fellowships to Dickinson House and Hedgebrook, among others. Her poems have appeared in Ninth Letter , Water~Stone Review , Waxwing , and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and is the cofounder, with Sun Yung Shin, of Poetry Asylum. Hwang currently lives in Minneapolis.

Reviews (1)

Publisher's Weekly Review

In this formally dexterous debut, Hwang interrogates language, identity, and cultural inheritance. Fittingly, the collection opens with a powerful gesture (a poem in Korean presented without translation) that sets the stage for a collection that proclaims form as not just an extension of narrative, but a narrative in and of itself. Hwang shifts from cleanly constructed tercets to prose blocks, couplets, lyric fragments, and dense strophes, complicating voice and narrative with each transition and formal shift. "Duality forms confluence: frenzy," Hwang writes, as though describing the book's own versatile poetics. "You: shape-shifter, agent of erasure, amateur magician,/ switcher of codes," she says elsewhere in a moment that seems to echo the work's own movements across the page. All along, the speaker seems to search for a linguistic vehicle that seems more real, and more true, than the "erasures" of culture and history she has witnessed. "Divide extraction to posit true values of coveting/ zero = the summation of erasures," she warns. This work succeeds in using the nuances of poetic technique to amplify an already powerful message of cultural identity. (Oct.)

Available:*

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Summary

Author Notes

Reviews (1)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Helpful Links

Research Links

Contact

Events and Rooms

Follow Us

Today's Hours