Böcker av Maw Shein Win

A collection of dreamlike poetry, accompanied by ink drawings, reflecting on the experiences of living in an aging body. With her latest collection, Maw Shein Win deftly braids together the pleasures, pains, and anxieties of living in an aging body, revealing how a mind can log thoughts and observations. Win employs new poetic forms to invite her readers into realms that are both deeply personal and universal, rendered with dreamlike imagery and surprising humor. Reflecting on our strange times and the atmospheric undercurrents of chaos and disintegration, Percussing the Thinking Jar is a hypnotic book and invites the reader into conversation with their own vulnerability and resilience. Throughout the book, sumi ink drawings by artist Mark Dutcher echo the rhythms of Win's poetry.

"With sharp focus and startling language, the poems in Maw Shein Win's second full-length book, Storage Unit for the Spirit House use 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, as forgotten children sleep under Mylar blankets and daughters try to see through the haze of a father's cigarette smoke. The artful 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 carefully curated collection of unlikely objects and images creates an act of ritual that uses language to interrogate how pain can transform into a nat or a siren. The minimal line length belies maximal imagination in this remarkable new book"--