Yearling
Yearling
Lo Kwa Mei-en
Winner of the 2013 Kundiman Poetry Prize
“Lo Kwa Mei-en’s Yearling is brilliant—blindingly smart and lit at midnight—hard and beautiful, so sharp ‘you could baptize a battlefield in it.’ Through its excavation of memory, trauma, girlhood, the body itself, it electrifies form and narrative in poems that are rich, journeyed, dark, resilient. So brave, too, in their song of recovery: wings and war and eggs and maps and scars and somehow, in the morning, vision. I am in awe of this book, will no doubt reread and reread it.”
—Anne Marie Rooney
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April 2015
ISBN: 9781938584107
Available in print and digital formats.
Lo Kwa Mei-en is from Singapore and Ohio. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Guernica, The Kenyon Review, West Branch, and other journals, and won the Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize. www.lokwameien.wordpress.com
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Additional Praise:
“You can’t step into Yearling and then come back out the same. You just can’t. Lo Kwa Mei-en’s words burn elementally—fire, water, fire, water— beatering you, halving you, splitting you, with symmetrical defiance and embrace, ever and again. A luminescent and branding volume of poems that lights everything on fire with one hand and tends coals with the other.”
—Brenda Brueggemann
“Birds and burdens are the glorious stuff of Lo Kwa Mei-en’s stunning first collection, Yearling. Liberated and vulnerable, fierce yet open wide, Mei-en’s poems are bent on burnished edges, making fast breaks to the celestial, and unfurling in curiosity as often as discovery. Ophelia, Pinnochia, and The Body all stand in service to the poet’s request to “know me harder.” And I, as her reader, want very much to do so.”
—Betsy Wheeler
“Defiant and uncategorizable, Lo Kwa Mei-en’s Yearling, with its teeming species, battles, and passions, read like an illuminated manuscript: mysterious, visceral, awe-full. Hers are some of the most enviable poems I have ever read, and herald Mei-en as the new standard bearer for innovative structure, terrifying acknowledgment, ecstatic statement, and, I daresay, beauty.”
—Kathy Fagan
“Yearling sets a reader up for pyrotechnics from the start, and it delivers.”
—Poetry Northwest
“The poems in [Mei-en’s] debut collection Yearling are visceral explorations of the connection between body and language, crackling with taut energies.”
—Poetry Ireland Review
“Lo Kwa Mei-en’s inaugural poetry collection Yearling asks no easy questions and provides no single answer—rather, it gives us duality warped over and over.”
—The Journal
“The poems in Lo Kwa Mei-en’s Yearling are poems of difference. They are poems of late capitalism. They embody a cyborg poetics: Lo Kwa Mei-en’s poems don’t attempt to return to or resurrect the canon; they assimilate the canon’s forms, its weaponry, and soldier on into its horizon, not with a battle cry, but with a young girl’s call for self-care.”
—Jasmine Dreame Wagner, Guernica
“Yearling fully understands life doesn’t live in compartments, it is awash in compartment-like structures that we keep spending time in our lives trying to identify.”
—Kenyon Review
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More by Lo Kwa Mei-en:
“This space is left empty to create a white space. To create a white separation block in these individual book pages, add a Quote Block”
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