The Burden of Being Burmese

by ko ko thett

" 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 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets .

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2015

About the author

ko ko thett is a poet by choice and Burmese by chance. In between he is a poetry editor, literary translator, and anthologist of contemporary Burmese poetry.

In 1995, whilst studying engineering at the Yangon Institute of Technology (YIT), thett began editing and publishing Old Gold, a campus samizdat in Burmese. In the aftermath of Funeral of Old Gold, his second chapbook, he was arrested and detained for his involvement in the December 1996 student uprising. After his release in April 1997, he left both YIT and Burma for Singapore and then Bangkok, where he spent three years working for the Jesuit Refugee Service Asia Pacific. In 2000, thett went to Finland where he took up peace and conflict studies at the University of Helsinki, before finally moving to Vienna to study with Wolfram Schaffar at the Institute for International Development at the University of Vienna.

His poems have been published in literary journals worldwide (from Griffith Review to Granta), and translated into Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, German and Finnish. The Burden of Being Burmese (Zephyr, 2015), a collection of ko ko thett's poems that have appeared in literary journals worldwide, is listed on ‘‘Nota Benes’’ by World Literature Today. thett's poems are anthologised in Best American Experimental Writing 2016 [BAX 2016], CAPITALS: A Poetry Anthology , The Borderlands of Asia: Culture, Place, Poetry, and Supplement among others. His work has been recognized with an English PEN Translation Award (2011) and an Honorary Fellowship in Writing at the University of Iowa (2016). After a whirlwind tour of Asia, Europe and North America for two decades, thett happily resettled in Sagaing in his native Burma-Myanmar in 2017. As of 2020 he is most likely to be spotted in the Golden Triangle area of Norwich, UK. thett writes in both Burmese and English.

Reviews

[World Literature Today]

This book was featured in the Nota Benes section of the May/Aug 2016 issue of World Literature Today Magazine.

http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...

[Greg Bem · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable examination (in English only) of Burmese life and culture in the 21st Century. These poems are humorous, quick-witted, and emotionally driven. While the book as a whole covers a bit too much in its territory and overextends itself on occassion, Thett's work is prominent and should be read by folks who want access to a world of the Myanmar imagery of today.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I could remember how I came across this book, clearly it was one of my more fortunate finds by happenstance when browsing at a bookstore but I can't remember which one.

Its one of the best poetry collections I've read in years, beautiful free verse. Thett takes a pleasure in messing with the English language that I think comes more naturally to someone who speaks as many languages as he does, with English not being the first. His poems are funny, tragic, angry, and beautiful.

[Louis Cabri]

Poems that exceed their devices, and in the poems working list fashion, expectations for each line.