Mouth

Winner, Association of Asian American Studies Poetry Book Award

1 Paperback

14.95

1 9781885030436

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“This book is wild, playful, gorgeous, weird, often hip. Reading it, I kept thinking, I wish I had come up with this phrase, this line, that entire poem, and that one, and that one, and that one...” — Linh Dinh, author of Jam Alerts “I looked up once, a big redtailed hawk swooping overhead, the wind it was riding ruffling feathers along the edge of its wing. Lisa Chen’s poetry pleases and astonishes me with that display of thrilling senses---other spirits appear unexpectedly in hovering bright mid-air, ordinal forces and natural realities indexed at play in the moment, articulated in rapt intelligence of language. Flashy and eerie, ordinate and inordinate, I am grateful Mouth startles with soulful complexity, Lisa Chen opening the verbal moment into fluent, quick gesture.” — Sesshu Foster, author of Atomik Aztex

14.95 Mouth, Lisa Chen’s debut collection of poetry, travels from parachute girls in Millbrae to Ezequiel the murderer at a border town, creating a cartography of geographic and bodily landscapes whose distances are measured by languages. As if wandering from place to place, Chen dabbles in different poetic forms, but always, words here confuse and betray, mouths eat and are eaten. Mouth is an elegiac love song to the mundane horrors of loss – genocide, heartbreak, revolution, exile. Yet, like Diane Arbus’ photos, Chen’s poems exude a mix of humor and pleasure, highlighting beauty in the perverse, and the perverse in the everyday. She gives voice to things that occur below the level of hearing or just beyond our notice—fragments of translated stories, unanswered bits of conversations, the mute assertiveness of a room. Mouth

2010-03-03T05:40:46Z

Winner, Victorian Premier’s Award for Fiction Winner, Christina Stead Fiction Prize Winner, NSW Premier’s Book of the Year

1 Paperback

17.95

10 9781885030429

464

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"Brian Castro plays with past and present in this complex, teasing, polyrhythmic, carnivalesque dance through phantom Shanghai." — J.M. Coetzee "[A]n extraordinary polyglot mix of sources: Portuguese, Chinese, English, Jewish and Catholic, and a mysterious recessive black gene.... told in Castro’s characteristically baroque prose, dense with its passion for language and serious wordplay. — The Age

17.95 After forty years in Australia, António Castro packs a bag and walks out of his old life forever. The victim of a restlessness and rootlessness he calls “shanghai dancing,” António seeks to understand his anxiety by retracing the wanderings of his Chinese, Portuguese, and English families. Arriving in Shanghai, where his families collided, António's world fragments: glittering prewar China, evangelical Liverpool, and 17th century Portugal fight for space with contemporary scenes of Asia Europe, and Australia. The stories of long-dead ancestors vie with those of new friends, family, and lovers. Combining photographs and written images, author Brian Castro’s fictional autobiography asks if life’s meaning is to be found in the moment or in memory. This “work of major significance [that] challenges our expectations of storytelling” is the US debut of one of Australia’s most complex and celebrated literary figures. Shanghai Dancing

2010-03-03T05:48:08Z

Winner, Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University

1 Paperback

14.95

16 9781885030412

180

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“Ayakawa Nobuo was born in Tokyo in 1920 between an influenza epidemic and a major earthquake. He died in Tokyo in 1982 while playing Super Mario Brothers. His poems… are strange, awkward, desperate, forceful, wild, and moving in these scrupulous, long-awaited English translations. You might read Nobuo to see what war did to him. You might read him because he’s a major poet whose work, still gathering force behind him, speaks directly to Americans in this dismal, blood-spattered moment of our own history.” — Forrest Gander

14.95 America and Other Poems by Japanese modernist poet Nobuo Ayukawa marks the first time this seminal work has been translated into a single volume in English. This landmark selection spans three decades from 1947-1976, ranging from Ayukawa's early work about his war experience on the front lines to later poems in which the influence of Western culture on Japanese society can be clearly felt. His lyrical, complex poetry offers a rare perspective on the modern Asian war experience from an ordinary soldier's point of view, and a unique window into the complex post-war relationship between Japan and America. This award-winning translation also features an essay by Ayukawa on his seminal poem “America,” as well as essays contextualizing Ayukawa and his work by Shogo Oketani. America & Other Poems

2010-03-03T05:37:33Z

1 Paperback

22.95

24 9781885030443

400

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“Kazuo Hara is one of the undiscovered geniuses of documentary. I first saw The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On at the San Francisco Film Festival. Werner Herzog and I were sitting together. We couldn’t believe it. Here was one of the weirdest, most dramatic stories ever. And the movie itself? What can I say? It’s on my list of the 10 best movies ever. You have all these layers: the underlying historical reality, the obsessed and crazed Mr. Okuzaki pursuing that historical reality despite all odds, and the obsessed and quite possibly crazed filmmaker pursuing Mr. Okuzaki. Here is the story of the film and the man behind it. A compelling narrative and journey.” — Errol Morris “It was as though I had this soul brother in Japan ... To have a kindred spirit, to have someone who has inspired me very early on ... I felt after watching [The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On] that I had permission to make Roger & Me the way I was making it.” — Michael Moore

22.95 Throughout the four decades of his career, filmmaker Kazuo Hara has stalked the bizarre and disturbing margins of Japanese society with his camera, certain that central truths can be found through an unrelenting examination of individuals and their interactions. His notoriously confrontational method of creating what he calls “action documentaries” has transformed the art of documentary filmmaking. Now, in this first full-length translation of Hara’s writings on his life and method, Hara tells his own story of growing up an outsider, detailing the fascinating processes that led to each of his groundbreaking documentaries. In addition, this book includes a full translation of the production notes for his most acclaimed film, The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, which has been described by the Village Voice as “one of the most harrowing, astonishing documentaries about war ever thrown onto celluloid.” Camera Obtrusa

2010-03-03T05:58:36Z

http://www.amazon.com/Hyperart-Thomasson-Akasegawa-Genpei/dp/1885030460/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262906282&sr=8-1

1 Paperback

17.95

25 9781885030467

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"Mr. Akasegawa is the kind of artist who inspires everybody every time he makes a new piece of art." — Yoko Ono "Why is the city always laughing at us behind our backs? Akasegawa, of course, knows the answer, but prefers to keep us prisoners of his enigma..." — Mike Davis, author of In Praise of Barbarians "An indispensable, hilarious, and faux-naïve map of postwar Japan, conceptual art making, and exactly that point in the '70s where Western consumerist culture collapses into unapologetic simulacra. Let this witty master of resistance usher you onwards to genuinely useful modes of higher observation … until one sees and knows only the startlingly different." — Michael Light, author of Full Moon and 100 Suns

17.95 <a href="http://thomasson.kaya.com">Visit the Thomasson Website...</a> Have you ever seen a Thomasson? That doorknob in a wall without a door, that driveway leading into an unbroken fence, that strange concrete … thing sprouting out of your sidewalk with no discernable purpose. Have you ever puzzled over its strangeness, or stopped to marvel at its useless beauty? In the 1970s Tokyo, artist Akasegawa Genpei and his friends began noticing what they termed “hyperart,” aesthetic objects created by removing a structure's function, while carefully maintaining the structure itself. They called these objects "Thomassons," after an American pinch-hitter recruited by a Japanese baseball team, whose bat never connected with a ball. In the 1980s, through submissions from students and readers, Akasegawa collected and printed photos of Thomassons in a column in Super Photo Magazine. He wrote these columns with a warm, goofy humor that seems intended to cast back nihilism, irony, and other common responses to 20th century urbanization. What emerged was a lighthearted, yet profound, picture of how modernization was changing Japan's urban landscape, and the culture that underpinned it. These columns, collected into a book, became a cult hit among late-eighties Japanese youth. What they saw in this assemblage of casual photos and humorous descriptions was, as essayist Jordan Sand puts it, “a way of regaining some sense of the human imprint on the city in an era when that imprint was being rapidly erased.” Hyperart: Thomasson

2010-03-03T05:58:58Z

2 Paperback

14.95

9 9781885030450

200

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"Part New York neighborhood portrait a la American-theater staples Street Scene and Dead End, part hard knocks but optimistic little-guy's story a la Edward Dahlberg's novel Bottom Dogs (1929), Lin's juicy, dialogue-heavy sophomore effort is rich, flavorful, and humane." — Roy Olson, Booklist (Starred Review) “Rich with political intrigue and a cultural landscape acutely alive, This Is a Bust takes the reader on a journey few are privileged to know.... A satisfying literary read that reads with the quickness of a summer fling read—but don’t read it quickly, you’ll want to savor this novel. Dark, beautiful, and humorous and not to be missed.” — Debra Magpie Earling, author of Perma Red “Reading This Is a Bust as well as Ed Lin’s first novel, Waylaid, is like fixing the frayed wiring of a light socket while standing in your bare feet in water during a lightning storm. Outside. We’re talking about Chinese-American characters who don’t play it safe and never went to medical school or got straight A’s in calculus. Take a risk, read this detective story and encounter a Chinatown well beyond the tourist neon and Grandma-arriving-in-America story.” — Shawn Wong, author of Homebase and American Knees

14.95 This Is a Bust, the second novel by award-winning author Ed Lin, turns the conventions of hard-boiled pulp stories on their head by exploring the unexotic and very real complexities of New York City’s Chinatown, circa 1976, through the eyes of a Chinese-American cop. A Vietnam vet and an alcoholic, Robert Chow’s troubles are compounded by the fact that he’s basically community-relations window-dressing for the NYPD: he’s the only Chinese American on the Chinatown beat, and the only police officer who can speak Cantonese, but he’s never assigned anything more challenging than appearances at store openings or community events. Chow is willing to stuff down his feelings and hang tight for a promotion to the detective track, despite the community unrest that begins to roil around him. But when his superiors remain indifferent to an old Chinese woman’s death, he is forced to take matters into his own hands. This Is a Bust is at once a murder mystery, a noir homage and a devastating, uniquely nuanced portrait of a neighborhood in flux, stuck between old rivalries and youthful idealism. This Is a Bust

2010-03-03T05:46:41Z

3 Paperback

12.95

2 9781885030030

150

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"[A] style that combines the comic pitch of a drag queen with crazed, daredevil experimental techniques unseen since the '60s heyday of Terry Southern and Hunter Thompson—all in a dense and startlingly beautiful pidgin dialect. Linmark nails the excitement and terror of being young with a rare and moving accuracy." — Dennis Cooper, Spin Magazine "Rolling the R's is a downright funky, hothouse treat." — Jessica Hagedorn "Linmark has done more than simply use the argot of equatorial poverty as a sexy, colorful idiom. In its structure, tone, and depths, Rolling the R's is true to the furious and witty rhythms of a vernacular culture of resistance." — Village Voice Literary Supplement "R. Zamora Linmark serves up an eccentric and enchanting blend of disco memories, Tiger Beat crushes, and pidgin English in Rolling the R's." — Out Magazine

12.95 Illuminated by pop fantasies, Donna Summer disco tracks, and teen passion, the fiercely earnest characters in Rolling the R's come to life against a background of burning dreams and neglect in a small 1970s Hawaiian community. In this daring first novel, tour-de-force experiments in narrative structure, pidgin, and perspective roll every "are", throwing new light on gay identity and the trauma of assimilation. Rolling the R's goes beyond "coming of age" and "coming out" to address the realities of cultural confusion, prejudice, and spiraling levels of desire in humorous yet haunting portrayals that are, as Matthew Stadler writes, "stylish, shameless, and beautiful." Rolling the R's

2010-03-03T05:40:10Z

Winner, PEN Open Book Beyond Margins Award Winner, Asian American Writers' Workshop Literary Award

5 Paperback

15.95

3 9781885030313

400

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“As engaged as he is intrepid, Luis H. Francia proves a sure-footed guide as he leads us through insurgencies and art exhibitions, cockfights and cabarets. Eye of the Fish is at once a hugely readable travelogue and an indispensable guide to a fascinating and richly varied archipelago.” —Amitav Ghosh, author of The Glass Palace “Gifted with a sharp eye for the incongruous, a keen taste for the ironic, and a deft feel for the tragic, Luis H. Francia writes about the Philippines like a man possessed by ghosts he can neither tame nor fully recognize. Haunted by childhood memories of a post-war Manila, Francia in turn has been haunting the land of his birth. He has visited the centers and peripheries of everyday lives, recounting encounters with victims and victimizers, retelling the rumors and truths that surround and inflect the most tumultuous events in the nation's recent history.” —Vicente L. Rafael, author of White Love and Other Events in Filipino History

15.95 A deft, luminously intelligent examination of the Philippines through a glass darkly. Cross-cutting between Francia's recollections of the Philippines of his youth and accounts of his travels through the archipelago over the past two decades, Eye of the Fish paints a vivid and detailed portrait of the terror, beauty, and insistent humanity of the Philippines today. Francia's odyssey takes him the length of the nation, from Batanes in the north to the Muslim Jolo and Marawi regions of the south, and from the rugged mountain hideaways of revolutionary freedom fighters to the well-appointed salons of the political and cultural elite. Painters and priests, island shamans and small-town politicians, cultists, feminists, and infamous first ladies all make an appearance in this imaginative and idiosyncratic exploration of "home." Through their stories, and through his own memories of estrangement and acceptance in the Philippines and in the U.S., Francia reflects on the hybridity that is simultaneously the burden and the benediction of the Philippines — and of his own mestizo self. Eye of the Fish

2010-03-03T05:41:26Z

5 Paperback

14.95

5 9781885030337

246

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"Poetic, energetic, swirling with wild sweeps of feeling, this is powerful and uninhibited writing which unleashes a world dense with ghosts, taboos, deceptions and violence... Bracing and exhilarating." — The Times, London

14.95 Sia Figiel's powerful, poetic skills weave together the voices of three generations of women from two families in Samoa and New Zealand. In this powerful sequel to her award-winning first novel, where we once belonged, Figiel invokes the mythic twin sisters who brought the tattoo custom to Samoa as guides to two young women as they navigate a society that threatens their self-determination as Samoans and as women. they who do not grieve

2010-03-03T05:43:26Z

9 Paperback

10.95

4 9781885030269

108

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"My favorite moment was a crafted jewel, as tight and nuanced a 123-word story as you're likely to find anywhere. — Nerve Magazine "Rutkowski combines carefully measured statements with a profound searching of the cultural landscape, refusing to accept literary prototypes." — American Book Review "Rutkowski's tale chronicles the confusion and opacity of traumatic childhood as it criticizes the American society that tolerates such inhumanity." — Publisher's Weekly

10.95 A quirky, deadpan look at fetish, violence, and family. Thaddeus Rutkowski's novel in short vignettes, gives a harrowingly deadpan account of the tedium, casual violence, and deviant sex lacing together a surreal, semi-rural childhood with adult urban neurosis. In a spare, flat, and unrelenting prose that has been honed to a point, Rutkowski ferrets out the hard bone of absurdity and humor at the center of emotional displacement. Roughhouse

2010-03-03T05:42:52Z

10 Paperback

14.95

6 9781885030382

184

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"Compelling... as graceful and agile on stage as she is on the page.... Uyehara is definitely one to watch." — Los Angeles Times "From this marvelous collection of performance chronicles, scripts, and reflections, Denise Uyehara emerges as an artist with a keen sense of the connectedness of things. "From this marvelous collection of performance chronicles, scripts, and reflections, Denise Uyehara emerges as an artist with a keen sense of the connectedness of things." — Coco Fusco, author of English is Broken Here "Like a Beat poet in search of America, Denise Uyehara doesn't merely set out to be artful, she aims to set the record straight! An artist of conceptual integrity and executed brilliance, she aims for the loftier state called the body, with poetry and ritual her traveling companions. Her marriage of language to movement is both astonishing and skillful: she rarely lets us down, she lets us in." — Luis Alfaro, Director, New Play Development, Mark Taper Forum Theatre

14.95 Maps of City and Body: Shedding Light on the Performances of Denise Uyehara presents the complete texts of "Big Head" and "Maps of City and Body," two of Uyehara's most acclaimed shows. In both works, Uyehara remains unflinchingly attentive to the transformative details that give our lives shape. This selection of Uyehara's performance pieces has been designed to function as both experience and documentation. It includes images from her performances, as well as detailed stage directions. It also includes detailed descriptions of Uyehara's other public art investigations, as well as a conversation with dancer/scholar Yutian Wong, a chronology of readings and stagings, and a bibliography. Maps of City and Body

2010-03-03T05:43:59Z

Winner, PEN Open Book Beyond Margins Award Finalist, Association of Asian American Studies Poetry Book Award

11 Paperback

12.95

7 9781885030399

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"Ishle Yi Park writes with a passionate and distinctive voice and a keen understanding of the intersections between individual and community life. These are poems that needed to be written, and need to be widely read." — Kim Addonizio, Author of What Is This Thing Called Love

12.95 Ishle Park's debut collection of poetry heralds the arrival of an exciting, vital new voice in poetry. In The Temperature of This Water, Park samples the climates of Rikers Island and Cheju Island, New York and Korea, to present an unflinching, meticulously detailed view of lives cracked open as much by love as they are by overwork, violence, and racism. Sharp street wit and a sensual attention to detail give vivid, palpable form to the lovers and criminals, mothers and gangsters who live behind the closed doors of New York immigrant life. Within each poem lies a story; within each story lies a whole community waiting to be uncovered. Whether tracing the paths of prisoners meeting girlfriends or Korean comfort women or .44s shot from rooftops in Brooklyn, Park's passion and uncompromising honesty lay bare the ruined heart of a city still pulsing with light. The Temperature of This Water

2010-03-03T05:44:22Z

12 Paperback

16.95

11 9781885030115

450

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"Kang is a born writer, everywhere he is free and vigorous: he has an original and poetic mind, and he loves life." — Thomas Wolfe "The story of Chungpa Han is truly, like the old New York he encounters, as 'million-hued as a dream.' A wonderfully resplendent evocation of a newcomer's America, Younghill Kang's classic novel is as vibrant and pointed in its vision today as it was 60 years ago, and may prove to be one of our most vital documents. East Goes West deserves rediscovery." — Chang-rae Lee, Author of Native Speaker "Kang is as wide-awake and high-spirited as he is scholarly and thoughtful, and he writes with a keen sense of character.... East Goes West offers a rich largesse of color and flavor, personality and impression and event. It is one of those rare books which will arouse interest, ring changes on laughter and leave its residue of thought." — New York Times Book Review "In a welcome new edition of the work of the father of Korean American literature, Kaya's East Goes West is a stunning testament to Younghill Kang's indomitable spirit, his perspicacious eye, and his special mirth. The book provides us with a rare view of how urban American life was experienced—and critiqued—by Korean immigrants in the 1920s." — Elaine Kim, University of California, Berkeley

16.95 Originally published in 1937, East Goes West is an extraordinary account of immigrant life in the 1920s written by the first Korean American novelist, Younghill Kang. Part picaresque adventure, part shrewd social commentary, East Goes West casts a sharply satirical eye on the demands and perils of assimilation as it follows the travels of the young, idealistic Chungpa Han through the United States and Canada. In its moving humanization of the often neglected Asian communities on the fringes of industrialization, East Goes West is an American classic. It is an invaluable resource for those interested in immigrant narratives, Asian diasporas, and twentieth-century American literature. Kaya's edition provides never before compiled supplementary materials on Kang's life and work, including a comprehensive bibliography, an annotated chronology, and a critical essay. East Goes West

2010-03-03T05:48:39Z

Winner, Commonwealth Writers' Prize

13 Paperback

14.95

14 9781885030276

235

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"Sia Figiel has written a passion, a song of longing and loss, a song of fire. The young woman in where we once belonged and the world she seeks to navigate are marvels of prose. I do not know from where Sia draws her insights and her language, but I'm as grateful for their existence as I am grateful for the sun." — Junot Díaz, author of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao "A storytelling triumph." — Elle Australia "A sort of Samoan Puberty Blues, in which Gauguin is dead but Elvis lives on." — Vogue Australia "A bold, accomplished and highly subversive first novel…Figiel's characters and language always remain lucid and powerful. Sia Figiel is to be congratulated on this complex, funny and richly rewarding novel." — Courier-Mail, Australia

14.95 A bestseller in New Zealand and winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Prize, Sia Figiel's debut novel represents an exciting and promising new voice on the international literary scene. It also marks the first time a novel by a Samoan woman has been published in the United States. Lively, spirited, and fiercely written, Figiel uses the traditional Samoan storytelling form of su'ifefiloi to talk back to Western anthropological studies on Samoan women and culture. In doing so, she weaves an honest - and sometimes brutal - coming-of-age story which combines poetry with an exhilarating combination of humor and violence. Told in a series of linked episodes which recall V. S. Naipaul and Sandra Cisneros, this powerful and highly original narrative follows thirteen-year-old Alofa Filiga as she navigates the mores and restrictions of her village, Malaefou, and comes to terms with her own womanhood and search for identity. Where We Once Belonged

2010-03-03T05:49:41Z

Winner, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award Finalist, PEN West Literary Award

16 Paperback

12.95

19 9781885030191

176

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"This is pure California mainlined straight into language that sears the skin off 99 percent of what purports to be literary competence. In a just world, Foster would be selling millions of copies of his beautiful accomplishment, but the world's not just, as the book's brilliant, crystalline pieces make plain, and that's why he's writing and why you should hear him and buy his book." — San Francisco Bay Guardian "This stuff is crackling! Foster's brilliant eye for the essentially human and his crisp blue-collar imagery create an important, powerful, moving prosody—the best since Kerouac and beyond." — Wanda Coleman "I thank Sesshu Foster for detailing the poetic soundtrack of a people and a place, of their history and their dreams. I know these streets, these images, these songs and voices; they reverberate inside me still, taking me back to the concrete river, the City Terrace topography. Sesshu Foster is dangerous, ese! The way a poet should be." — Luis J. Rodriguez "Sesshu Foster startles you, surprises you, even shocks you; his writing sparkles with new insights and images; at the same time, he engages you in the context of continuing history and you realize you're in what could be familiar territory: 'Ah, yes--how it is!'" — Lawson Fusao Inada

12.95 In this powerful collection of prose poetry, Sesshu Foster maps the physical and psychological terrain of his childhood home, the predominantly Chicano barrio of East Los Angeles known as City Terrace. More than a tour through a bleak and burnt out landscape, however, City Terrace Field Manual is a guide to reading the face of a neighborhood — its histories and inhabitants, landmarks and wars. Haunted by L.A.'s explosive past, these vignettes and poetic riffs trace the lines of violence, racism, and neglect that lead from the World War II internment of Japanese Americans to the warfare on the streets of Watts and Koreatown to the frustrated anger of a boy punching out factory windows with his bare fists. Foster's poems push the boundaries of form and language, embodying the multiplicity, the double vision, and the explosive tension at the heart of the urban edge. City Terrace Field Manual

2010-03-03T05:56:36Z

Winner, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award

17 Paperback

14.95

21 9781885030283

256

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"The Anchored Angel is a marvelous reintroduction to the work of one of the greatest pioneers of Asian American literature. For José Garcia Villa was our bitter, narcissistic angel of both late Modernism and early post-colonialism, an inventive, luminous intelligence full of sweet song and possessed of an unforgettably unique, bilious presence of a legend. Like the César Vallejo of Trilce, Villa could be abstract, elusive, eccentric, yet capable of a lyric passion so intense, both heart and throat ache to intone his strophes. Editor Eileen Tabios and the contributing essayists have accomplished a literary treasure, an archive, and a clear-eyed act of literary homage to an important figure in twentieth-century world poetry." — Garrett Hongo, author of Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai'i "Mr. Villa seems to me to possess one of the purest and most natural gifts discoverable anywhere in contemporary poetry. This accounts for his power to say, quietly, the most astonishing and exalted things." — Mark Van Doren "Depth is not the fashion, and even the well-disposed reader may startle at certain paradoxical avowals in these bravely deep poems by José Garcia Villa. A new poet, a young native from the Philippines, this author; and his work is for the most part new to print, but final wisdom encountered in poem after poem merely serves to emphasize the disparity between tumult and stature." — Marianne Moore, from a review of Have Come, Am Here "and i am alive to see a man against the sky" — e. e. cummings "A poet with a great, even an astonishing, and perfectly original gift." — Dame Edith Sitwell

14.95 The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by José Garcia Villa reintroduces the work of the celebrated writer to the United States. At the height of his career, Villa’s writings earned him prizes, fellowships, and lavish praise from some of the greatest literary luminaries of the day. Yet his work has been out of the public eye for more than thirty years and out of print for more than fifteen. Although named a National Artist in the Philippines where he was born, Villa remains largely unknown in the United States today. Kaya’s republication of Villa’s writings both recovers and rediscovers the work of this fierce iconoclast for a new generation. Included are reprints of his major poems and representatives from each of his significant experiments, as well as short stories and non-fiction work. Edited by acclaimed author of Black Lightning: Poetry-in-Progress, Eileen Tabios, Kaya’s collection includes essays by contemporary Filipino and Filipino American writers Luis Cabalquinto, Nick Carbó, Jonathan Chua, Luis Francia, Nick Joaquin, E. San Juan, and Alfred Yuson, and a foreword by Jessica Hagedorn. The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by José Garcia Villa

2010-03-03T05:57:18Z

18 Paperback

22.5

23 9781885030405

272

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"It is obvious that Takeshi is a great genius. When watching his films, one never knows what is around the corner. What is believed to be a straight line suddenly becomes a curving bend — it's as if he's in a deep, Zen-like meditation. If you watch his films more than once, you'll discover even more layers of meaning in them. They are like works of modern art, just made with film, and it is important that they receive more recognition. I feel so much joy when watching his films; it is an honor to be one of his fans. I hope this book will bring to light the works of a true artist." — John Woo, director "As an actor and a director, Takeshi Kitano is the most dynamic and fascinating Japanese cinema import of the past 15 years. This translation of Casio Abe's in-depth study of his sometimes baffling oeuvre is a godsend for his non-Japanese speaking fans." — J. Hoberman, film critic The Village Voice "Casio Abe's double-sided portrait of *kamikaze* comedian and master director "Beat" Takeshi Kitano is as crafty and unpredictable as its subject: bullet-in-the-head funny one minute, gut-jabbingly sophisticated the next. A rare and compelling glimpse into the idiosyncratic world of contemporary Japanese Film Studies." — Chuck Stephens, Film Comment

22.5 World-renowned filmmaker Takeshi Kitano initially became popular in his native Japan through his legendarily caustic alter ego, the comedian Beat Takeshi. Here in the United States, he is primarily known for innovating a stylish noir aesthetic admired by such directors as Martin Scorcese and Quentin Tarantino. This collection of essays by Casio Abe, one of Japan's preeminent cultural critics, examines both Kitano's films and his Beat Takeshi persona, offering an incisive critique of the consumer culture that Kitano's films and comedy both draw on and play against. It is the first book on Kitano's work to be published in English. Beat Takeshi vs. Takeshi Kitano

2010-03-03T05:58:21Z

Winner, Josephine Miles Award from PEN Oakland Finalist, Norma Farber First Book Award, Poetry Society of America

19 Paperback

8.95

22 9781885030252

112

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"Luckily it's the world. Miraculously, Koon Woon is alive in it, reminding us joyful and brilliant, sad as salt, untranslatable - live! Li Po in modern drag, the voice of New America, samo scrabbling to pay rent - Your father is buried in the same cemetery as Bruce Lee, you karate chop Whitman's block of wood, eat egg tarts to feel Chinese and buy a Japanese automatic rice cooker - perfect every time! The tradition of the wanderer is just a moment forever in the world's longest alley, under the table, the bubblegum kiss of the Tang dynasty - what a mess! Luckily, it's the world. Miraculously, Koon Woon has written The Truth. You read it!" — Bob Holman, Author, In With the Out Crowd (Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records) "Koon Woon, like Bob Kaufman, is a writer of solitudes. But like Walt Whitman, his solitudes contain multitudes. Join Koon Woon in his imaginings and enter into his room." — Steve Cannon, Director, A Gathering of the Tribes "These poems set a thousand horses galloping in the Asian diaspora in which so many are caught." — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

8.95 Typed out in cramped tenement rooms or scrawled on bits of paper, Koon Woon's impulsive, startling poetry, collected for the first time in The Truth in Rented Rooms, probes the lonely world of itinerants and the dispossessed that is found in the shadows of immigrant life in the United States. His beat is one of narrow Chinatown alleyways and Greek diners, damp hotel rooms and emptying city parks. It is also a place of chance encounters and lingering epiphanies, pieced together through ruminations on Eastern and Western philosophical traditions, love and modal logic, present and past. Ranging in style from classical lyricism to syllabic construction to street shouting, Woon's poetry travels literally and figuratively beyond the constrained and finite world of the tenement poverty that is his subject to places distant - pre-Mao China, steel towns, a pastoral childhood. Woon's poetry - penetrating yet playful, and attuned to the breaks and charges of his own economic displacement and mental illness - attest to the regenerating eddies and convergences at the heart of a fully realized imagination. The Truth In Rented Rooms

2010-03-03T05:57:36Z

Winner, American Book Award

20 Paperback

11.95

20 9781885030016

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"Reading The Unbearable Heart you have the sense of someone tearing the past apart and rebuilding with naked, raw hands. The work is furious, flawed and absolutely necessary." — Adrienne Rich "It may sound odd to call a book of elegies exciting, but while reading The Unbearable Heart you'll find yourself catching your breath as much as you weep. If the poet's work is to find a way to speak the unutterable, take this book as your guide." — Cornelius Eady "Hahn's gaze is confident and immediate" — Poetry Calendar

11.95 A 1996 recipient of the American Book Award, The Unbearable Heart is a superbly composed yet passionate book of grief, mourning, and the overcoming of a mother's death. Creating ever-deepening cycles of feeling and insight, the poems range across a stunning variety of poetic landscapes and voices, from Murasaki's Genji to Roland Barthes' masculinist post-structuralism. Kimiko Hahn's use of innovative forms continues her explorations of Japanese folk and classical themes and poetics, while her magnificently imagined voice of Kuchuk Hanem, the Egyptian prostitute described/silenced in Flaubert's travelogues, bravely ventures into new areas of meaning suppressed by Orientalism about the Middle East. The Unbearable Heart

2010-03-03T05:56:52Z

21 Paperback

13.95

18 9781885030368

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"Like Endou, Josey Foo's first book, Tomie's Chair is an indefinable work. More choreography than inscription as though air were the page on which it were written. As though composed out of doors. The chair is the most specific object in the field; it centers the field, but the chair is light and the center moves. The speaker a mere inference: 'That there are a thousand stories to affirm the negative of me and perhaps only one story to reverse it.' A new work by Josey Foo maintains a beautiful fidelity to the space between objects, beings, words and honors its own immanence with her deft, invisible brush." — C.D. Wright

13.95 Tomie's Chair is inspired by the 1996 mixed-media installation "Arrival" by Tomie Arai at the Lower East Side Printshop, New York City. It is an allegory of outward and inward movement. The chair is a symbol of rest but also of decision — to rise and move beyond signposts, to change and break bonds, to be independent and create new bonds within one's own static, open spaces; to go further than the signposts at the end of a half open road. Tomie's Chair

2010-03-03T05:56:01Z

23 Paperback

16.95

27 9781885030221

200

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16.95 Collapsing New Buildings takes its name from the recent upsurge of industrial accidents throughout Asia. The 1995 collapse of the Sampoong Department Store in Seoul claimed hundreds of lives, and similar disasters have hit Thailand, India, China, and other nations of the so-called "developing world." These events were perhaps the most dramatic evidence of a crisis in the economic and political development of Asia and the Pacific in the 1990s. Foregrounding critical dialogues between the most outspoken intellectuals in Asia and the diaspora, Collapsing New Buildings looks at the ways development has been theorized in an Asian context and interrogate the ways historical ideas of progress have been considered. To facilitate the exchange of critical ideas among diasporic and Asian communities, a third of Collapsing New Buildings has been translated into Korean. Collapsing New Buildings features: • Nobel Peace Prize nominee Sulak Sivaraksa and bell hooks on development as if people mattered. • Rem Koolhaas and Masao Miyoshi on tabula rasa and new projects in Asia. • Vandana Shiva and Joung Yoon Lym on bioengineering, intellectual property, and the colonization of science. • Haunani-Kay Trask on sovereignty in Hawai'i. • Critical Art Ensemble on posthuman development. • Celeste Olalquiaga on tourism and decay in Caracas. • A graphic story by Hanawa Kazuichi. • A portfolio on the new wave of Iranian cinema, edited by Jamsheed Akrami. • New fiction and poetry by Karen Tei Yamashita, Kimiko Hahn, and le thi diem thuy. • Artist's projects by Mariko Mori, Shu Lea Cheang, Kim MyoungHye, and Ahn Sung-Keum. Collapsing New Buildings

2010-03-03T05:54:46Z

24 Paperback

19.95

26 9781885030153

272

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19.95 The inaugural volume features art and writing by Yi Sang, Kang Nae-hui on Lotte World's shaping of consumer experience in Seoul, paintings on military sex slavery by Miran Kim, photographs on scale and simulacra at Florida's Splendid China by Richard Barnes, and scenes from Nam June Paik's Tribute to Charlotte Moorman. Muae 1

2010-03-03T05:53:55Z

25 Paperback

13.95

12 9781885030245

200

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"I couldn't put Oriental Girls Desire Romance down.... I thank [Catherine Liu] for this book." — Kathy Acker, author of Blood and Guts in High School

13.95 New York of the eighties: a time and a place where money is the most powerful intoxicant, glamour demands the embrace of excess, and cocaine evokes only the shadow of a risky proposition's sharp high. While fortunes are being made in Soho galleries and on Wall Street, an underclass of transients-drag queens and dandies, club kids and strippers, artists and actors/models/wait staff-circulate through the streets, serving as the city's background color, cheap labor, and sleazy entertainment. The unnamed narrator of Oriental Girls Desire Romance, a young Chinese American woman, is a sharp and eloquent wit who skirts the edges of privilege and privation in this, New York's own floating world. A refugee from the neuroses of an Ivy League education and a family of Maoist ideologues, she is also a recovering theory junkie who prefers her hits of reality straight up. Navigating the demimonde of New York as slacker, temp, and exotic dancer, she outmaneuvers the easy answers of Prozac or reform in a voice that is at once perceptive, hilarious, and refreshingly unhinged. Oriental Girls Desire Romance

2010-03-03T05:48:58Z

26 Paperback

12.95

8 9781885030320

200

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"Wonderful... In Waylaid, Lin has crafted an unforgettable story from the rundown landscapes of the New Jersey Shore and from the ambivalant geographies of his young narrator's heart... A coming-of-age novel that is both piercing and tender... Lin is an astonishing talent." — Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao "Ed Lin has wrought an Asian American Holden Caulfield, whose view from his tightly conscripted life of working at his parents' motel is to get laid without getting fucked. No model minority success here, this is the harsh universe of working class immigrants, a nether world that both fascinates and repels." — Helen Zia "There's great humor here, and great storytelling. What Ed does best is what only great writers do - he tells the truth. I'm a fan for life." — Wayne Kramer, co-founder of MC5 and Mad for the Racket

12.95 Waylaid is the story of a Chinese American boy struggling to grow up amidst the drudgery and sexual innuendo of his parent¹s sleazy motel on the Jersey Shore. Conscripted into the family business, the protagonist spends his summer days and after-school hours renting out rooms to johns and hookers, lonely old men, and families whose homes have been repossessed. He becomes obsessed with losing his virginity, a preoccupation whose very intensity reflects a society that delivers sex as a distraction from despair. In its blackly humorous exploration of immigrant dreams and working class realities, Waylaid is a switchblade in the gut to stories of overachievement and success that ignore the human cost. Waylaid

2010-03-03T05:46:19Z

27 Paperback

12.95

17 9781885030344

128

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“Generous and without pretense, these poems not only show us what it's like to dwell in two worlds, his ancestral home in Magarao, Philippines, and his beloved Manhattan, but also chronicle what it feels like to be human. Cabalquinto's poetry captures a range of lyrical events and the poet's obsession with transcendence and delights in the common union between the sacred and the profane.” — Eugene Gloria, author of Drivers at the Short-Time Motel “Although Luis Cabalquinto has been writing some of the most stimulating American poetry since the end of the Second World War, with the publication of Bridgeable Shores, for the first time we are treated to a full feast of poems that only the literary cognoscenti had on their menus. A welcome addition to the field of Asian American literature from a Filipino master of letters, this collection is a must for all libraries.” — Nick Carbó, author of Secret Asian Man “Luis Cabalquinto suffers from a useful malady for poets: a passion for the turn and tuck of words. He serves them up on a strong bed of narrative, of story. These poems teach, tell us about the dilemmas of exile and immigration, what happens when we look back at the cities we have left and begin to sing before we turn to stone.” —Indran Amirthanayagam, author of El Infierno de los Pajaros

12.95 Bridgeable Shores: Selected Poems (1969-2001) is the first United States publication of the work of the veteran Filipino American poet Luis Cabalquinto. This long overdue collection features the compassion, wisdom, and well-being gained from the multi-ethnic worlds the author inhabits. Comprising four sections in total, it is the first two that form the heart of the book: "Morningland," which features poems inspired by the Philippines, and "Sun on Ice," inspired by New York. By choosing this structure of two separate but "bridgeable" shores, Cabalquinto embodies the expatriate Filipino as poet and celebrates the possibility of crosscultural harmony. Bridgeable Shores

2010-03-03T05:55:43Z

28 Paperback

44.95

15 9781885030146

595

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"Demonstrating the infinite range of possibilities overlooked by the too easily applied label of 'multicultural', this collection steeps the reader in alternative histories and approaches to language and tells stories seldom—if ever—heard. Recommended for most poetry collections." — Library Journal "An exquisite artifact of activist experimentalism, theoretically smart and so beautiful it hurts, Premonitions promises to be a landmark in American letters for many years to come." — Maria Damon, University of Minnesota "An impressive collection distinguished by its variety and sweep. By turns entertaining, exciting, troubling, it is always provocative. A major contribution." — David Palumbo-Liu, Stanford University "Up to recently, Asian American literary anthologies have served to canonize authors, works, tastes, and ideas. Premonitions is different. From conception to layout, it explodes impulses to map centers and margins of Asian American poetry. Premonitions gives us a brilliant variety of poetry and poets who together show, we are all this and more." — Stephen Sumida, University of Washington

44.95 The most comprehensive anthology of Asian North American poetry to date, Premonitions gathers work-ranging from cyberpunk meditations and Buddhist odes to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-influenced and neo-Orientalist writing--and juxtaposes them in ways that both echo and subvert categories of theme, poetics, and identity. Video and multimedia texts, pidgin poetry, queer writing, and Canadian open-field compositions further broaden the scope of this ground-breaking collection. The 73 contributors include veteran authors like Jessica Hagedorn, Lawson Fusao Inada, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Fred Wah, Kimiko Hahn, Arthur Sze, and John Yau, as well as such "premonitory" new poets as R. Zamora Linmark, Barry Masuda, Evelyn Lau, Amitava Kumar, and an emerging generation of Vietnamese and Korean American poets. Also featured are previously unpublished poems by the late Frances Chung, Roy Kiyooka, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry

2010-03-03T05:53:30Z

2009-12-30T23:35:59Z

"...[E]xemplifies globalization as a people-centered phenomenon of migration and exchange..." —CNN Traveller "What Arundhati Roy is to imperialism/fascism/racism in prose, Patel is to them in poetry." —The Gulf Today (United Arab Emirates) "[Patel] brings out what it means to be a woman in an empire..." —San Francisco Chronicle

Kaya Press is proud to announce that we will be publishing Shailja Patel's Migritude. Part poetic memoir, part performance tour-de-force, Migritude invokes the power and dignity of outsider status in telling her story of African and Asian roots. Patel, a second generation South Asian brought up in Kenya, draws upon letters from her mother, conversations with her father, slam poetry, meditations on anatomy and neurobiology, and Swahili children’s songs to explore masculinity and mother tongues, migrants and race. A portion of Migritude was published as a bilingual (Italian-English) poetry collection by Lietocolle (Italy) in 2008, and shortlisted for the prestigious 2009 Premio Lettarario Camaiore international poetry prize. Migritude

2009-12-31T00:31:32Z