THE BURDEN OF BEING BURMESE
poems by Ko Ko Thett
The poems in this collection, many of which have appeared in English-language literary magazines worldwide, range from "faddish sugar crystals," written in Burmese for Ko Ko Thett's 1996 illegal campus chapbook at the Yangon Institute of Technology, to his autumn 2014 "anxiety attack" at the University of Leuven.
Ko Ko Thett's poetry explores the possibility of the translatability of lived experience between the personal and the political, and the possibility of the mutual transferablilities between languages as disparate as Burmese, English and Finnish — as in "you even understand my language, perkele." The burden of being Burmese is not just his. It is also yours.
112 pages
B/W. Softcover
204 mm (H) x 153mm (W)
48 poems in English
ISBN 978-1-938890-16-1 (US)
ISBN 978-988-13114-5-0 (HK)
HK$120
US$15 (online purchase)