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This collection follows the writer's struggle with masculinity from a small town in upstate New York to a boxing academy in Beijing. As much as it is the story of pain, it is also a journey to healing. For violence is our patrimony, but it is not our destiny. These poems challenge masculinity narratives, and master narratives in general, by reaching toward vulnerability and beauty.--Publisher.
List of contents
Table of Contents
Kindness Comes Too Easily to Wicked Men
Part I
Act I
Master (Five Nocturnes)
Drawing of a Skeleton
Reverence
Descendent
every scar is an eye which has seen too much
Part II
Ripening
Patrimony
after seven days I hear his voice
Testing the Waters
Self-Defense
Obsession
Clearing the Hills
What is Is Left
Part III
Mythomania
Day One
Specter
Feel Him Out
Training in Yizhuang
He Says My Name
The Queen’s Birthday, Bangkok (2011)
Cutting Weight
Record
To hide from the dead / To be with the living
Absolution
Self-Portrait
About the author
Simon Shieh is a Taiwanese American poet and essayist. He has lived in upstate New York and Beijing, China, where he co-founded
Spittoon Literary Magazine, which translates the best new Chinese writing into English. From 2008-2014 he competed as an amateur and professional Muay Thai fighter in China, Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, and the U.S. Simon's work has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He lives in the U.S. with his wife, Charlotte, and their dog, Momo.
Master is his first collection of poems.
Summary
Winner of the 2022 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Terrance Hayes.
The debut collection from Simon Shieh, Master is a stark, surreal, and imagistic reckoning with a traumatic past. Master follows the speaker's struggle with masculinity from a martial arts school in upstate New York to a boxing academy in Beijing. Language emerges in this collection not as a neutral witness to a boy’s subjugation, but as the very tool of hegemony, though one which also holds the key to its own undoing, and therefore to freedom. As much as Master is the story of pain, it is also a journey to healing, illuminating that while violence can be our patrimony, it does not have to be our destiny.
Foreword
Significant bound galley printing for booksellers and reviewers. Additional eGalley distribution to media, booksellers, and librarians through Edelweiss and targeted e-mailings.
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Excerpts in: POETRY Magazine, Split Lip Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, Southern Humanities Review, Asian American Writer’s Workshop, Narrative Magazine, Passages North, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Cleaver, and elsewhere.
Promotion through author website: https://www.simonshieh.com/
