Storage Unit for the Spirit House

Storage Unit for the Spirit House
Maw Shein Win
RRP:
NZ$ 44.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 38.24
Paperback
Not defined - 88pg
7 Nov 2020 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9781632430861
Out Of Stock
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With sharp focus and startling language, the poems in Maw Shein Win' s second book, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, look through physical objects to glimpse the ephemeral, the material, and the immaterial. Vinyl records, felt wolverines, a belt used to punish children, pain pills, and "show dogs with bejeweled collars" crowd into Win' s real and imagined storage units. Nats, Buddhist animist deities from her family' s homeland of Burma, haunt the book' s six sections. The nats, spirits believed to have the power to influence everyday lives, inhabit the storage units and hover around objects while forgotten children sleep under Mylar blankets and daughters try to see through the haze of a father' s cigarette smoke. Assemblages of both earthly and noncorporeal possessions throughout the collection become resonant and alive, and Win must summon "a circle of drums and copper bells" to appease the nats who have moved into a long-ago family house. This careful curation of unlikely objects and images becomes an act of ritual collection that uses language to interrogate how pain in life can transform someone into a nat or a siren that lives on. Restrained lines request our imagination as we move with the poet through haunted spaces and the objects that inhabit them.
"To enter the spirit houses, storage units, and myriad spaces Maw Shein Win opens for us in the pages of her new collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House is to enter a universe where familiar objects and structures take on new shapes and significance. The poems are tight, condensed, and without digression, and the result is transporting. Shein Win sets scenes with particularity and immediacy to fully immerse the reader in each storage unit or sky, water, or physical space, and her sparing use of punctuation, along with lineation that includes short lines and ample white space, dictate a slow, thoughtful pace. "-- "Women' s Voices for Change" "In Maw Shein Win' s second poetry collection, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, we enter various portals, from Burma to California (and beyond), emerging in pieces with ' directions to the otherworld. ' Each poem is a small offering, a look at certain illnesses and violence within family, including land and the bodies they occupy. To honor these spaces, Win writes ' we wore bright colors to disorient the animals. ' These poems are crafted with such precision that these travels teach us how ' to mark the now' even when we feel trapped by sunsets, cinemas, or reliquaries. This is a beautiful book. "--Khaty Xiong, author of Poor Anima "These spare poems are haunted. With a blown-up heart, Win writes about possessions and flashes that hark back like ghosts to our before' s. In Storage Unit for the Spirit House prisons, tombs, portals, bottles, storage units are memorials. I would call these poems luminous and gorgeously darkly-edged, bellowing as they do with the knowledge that we never truly depart from all of our departed things. "--Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree
Maw Shein Win is the author of Invisible Gifts: Poems and her chapbooks include Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. Maw is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito (2016-18). She lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9781632430861
Published: 7 Nov 2020
Published In: United States
Imprint: Omnidawn Publishing
Publisher: Omnidawn Publishing
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88

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