Fallen innocents on blood-stained streets. The defiant banging of pots and pans echoing in the darkness. The birth of a springtime revolution amidst the interrupted lives of a country and its people. On the morning of 1 February 2021, a coup d’état was initiated by the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military, effectively overthrowing the democratically elected members of the country’s ruling party, the National League for Democracy, and casting Myanmar into chaos.\nThis volume collects the poetry and prose of the many writers, cultural figures, and everyday people on the ground in Myanmar’s urban centres, rural countryside and in the diaspora, as they document, memorialize, or merely try to come to grips with the violence and traumas unfolding before their eyes. Written in English or translated from the original Burmese the collection includes some of Myanmar’s most important contemporary authors and dissidents, such as Ma Thida, Nyipulay and K Za Win, as well as up and coming authors and poets from all over Myanmar, reflecting the country’s rich cultural and ethnic diversity.\nIn addition, poetry and essays that reflect socioeconomic life of the so-called transitional Myanmar (2010-2020), a period of relative freedom for writers when much of the censorship regime was lifted and the internet and social media were introduced in the country, as well as prominent protest poems and essays, by dissidents Min Ko Naing, U Win Tin and Min Lu, who lived through the hopes and horrors of the 1988 uprising of Myanmar are featured in this volume.\nA feast for the literary imagination, an elegy to those who have fallen, and a courageous act of defiance by those that continue to fight, these firsthand accounts provide an important window into a crucial moment in Myanmar’s history.

Picking off new shoots will not stop the spring: Witness Poems and Essays from Burma/Myanmar (1988–2021)

Literature & Fiction

Thett, Ko Ko

Poetry

Gaudy Boy, LLC

"The Burden of Being Burmese displays an extraordinary fertile and febrile imagination—one that will both delight and disturb American readers."—Marjorie Perloff
"A brilliantly off-kilter book."—John Ashbery
Ko Ko Thett writes that he is "a poet by choice and a Burmese by chance." The poems in this collection—the first major volume in English by a contemporary Burmese poet—range from "faddish sugar crystals," written in Burmese for his 1996 illegal campus chapbook in Yangon, to his autumn 2014 "anxiety attack" in the Netherlands, where he now lives. Thett is the co-editor and translator of the seminal volume Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets.

The Burden of Being Burmese

Zephyr Press

Review\n"The Burden of Being Burmese is a rare case of a poetry book that's been genuinely long awaited... The book is a kaleidoscopic journey through the mostly urban and rural landscapes that make up modern Burma; a road movie in which [Ko Ko Thett] observes with passionate indignation, eschewing sentimentality and invariably casting a cold eye... Ko Ko Thett is a poet of great depth and range." -- Joe Woods, Dublin Review of Books (June 2015)\n"[The Burden of Being Burmese's] primary poetic habit is the list: thett's lists are slapstick, capacious, contradictory, free-wheeling, vengeful, and above all cannibalistic. If thett's ethic is based on eating everything, his poems attempt that impossible feat by piling it all into the stomach of the poem, each morsel separated only a comma.... Laughing along with thett may hurt. It may catch your throat. There is no promise of redemption here." -- Sean Pears, Jacket2 (March 2016)\n"[Thett] defines the burden of being Burmese through a deep and expansive dive into the quotidian particulars of life as a Burmese national, an expat, a political person, and a poet. ...buses, buskers, and bureaucracies emerge from the humid heat of the imagination. As Thett says, being Burmese is chance, but his poems are an ecumenical burden, an essential and exact experience of their own." -- Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers, Los Angeles Review of Books (November 2016)\nKo ko thett’s poems ― described by John Ashbery as “brilliantly off-kilter” ― bring oddball lists, linguistic inventiveness, and sardonic humor to the brutal contradictions of life and history in and outside of his native Burma. In some poems he muses on chairs or metaphors or potatoes, while elsewhere, and often with the same, dispassionate tone, he turns his gaze on a strangulating bureaucracy or the horrific treatment of prisoners. Thett writes in Burmese and in English. In this second volume to appear in English, most are English originals but thirteen will be presented bilingually on facing pages.

Bamboophobia: Bilingual in Burmese and English

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Thett, Ko Ko. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Thett, Ko Ko

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Thett, Ko Ko. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Picking off new shoots will not stop the spring: Witness Poems and Essays from Burma/Myanmar (1988–2021)

The Burden of Being Burmese

Bamboophobia: Bilingual in Burmese and English