Southeast Asian American Verse in the Time of Coronavirus
Looking for something to read because you find yourself suddenly with a lot of free time but no place to socialize? This year is the 45th anniversary of the Southeast Asian diaspora, especially for the Lao and Hmong community. Because April is National Poetry Month, Little Laos on the Prairie is providing a reading list of poetry books that are still relatively easy to order from Southeast Asian poets. We recommend ordering directly from their publishers to support them, but you can also find many at major new and used bookselling websites. Lao Poets Light by Souvankham Thammavongsa, Pedlar Press, 2013. This collection won the Trillium Award in Canada for the best book of the year, examining life in Ontario. Light is among the one of the author’s books that are easier to find hers compared to her classics Small Arguments and Found, the latter of which was inspired by a scrapbook she discovered in the trash her father had kept while in the Thai refugee camps. Found later inspired a short film. Her latest collection, Cluster tackles everything from war to …