Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I reviewed Monica Youn's new book FROM FROM for The Poetry School in the UK. "From From, Monica Youn’s fourth book of poems, is a striking departure from her first three books. Instead of addressing race obliquely and occasionally, From From confronts it full-on, from beginning to end. Interviewed in Bomb magazine, Youn explained, ‘I always felt I had permission to talk about race, but I wanted to figure out a way to write about race that would ring true to me.’ The child of Korean immigrants, Youn trains her incisive intelligence and considerable lyrical gift on her experience growing up in Texas and living in New York as a racial minority. The result is a volume of poems that is deeply heartfelt yet bracingly suspicious, exploratory and accomplished...." If you're in NYC and would like to hear Monica Youn read, please consider coming to this fun Happy Hour jointly organized by the NY Public Library and Singapore Unbound on Friday, May 26, 5.30-7.30 pm, on a midtown...

 On Sunday, we had friends over for a holiday brunch. It went on into the evening when our neighbor Judy joined us, and Guy and she immersed themselves in talk about the management of the building.  Yesterday, I read Monica Youn's From From. Still trying to figure out what to say about it in a review for Poetry School. Met Henry for dinner at Pisticci and had a good time as always. Hart Crane as Whitman's heir. The Communist Auden and the Christian Auden. That racism in the US cannot be explained wholly by white supremacy. Our sisters, and their attitudes to our being gay. Came home, and watched another episode of Blacklist , and then finished the first episode of The Recruit , starring a beefy Noah Centineo as a CIA lawyer and a magnetic Laura Haddock as a former CIA asset who is threatening to expose her relationship with the agency.

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Last spring, at my all-girls independent school, I taught a senior-year poetry workshop called "A Portfolio of Selves: Four Asian American Women Poets," focusing on the work of Monica Youn, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Celina Su, and Jenifer Sang Eun Park. The students responded enthusiastically and imaginatively to the variety of subject matter and style in these very different poets. I was immensely impressed by the students' eagerness to learn from these eloquent experiments in contemporary poetry. The poems written by one student, Charlotte Baker, stood out for their self-assured adoption of the means on offer to convey her very own ends. I had very little to offer her in terms of feedback. The poems were whole, or almost so. The poems were incredibly vulnerable too. They transcended the writing exercises to become genuine investments in discovery and feeling. They have now been publis...