Bamboophobia: Bilingual in Burmese and English

Review\n"The Burden of Being Burmese is a rare case of a poetry book that's been genuinely long awaited... The book is a kaleidoscopic journey through the mostly urban and rural landscapes that make up modern Burma; a road movie in which [Ko Ko Thett] observes with passionate indignation, eschewing sentimentality and invariably casting a cold eye... Ko Ko Thett is a poet of great depth and range." -- Joe Woods, Dublin Review of Books (June 2015)\n"[The Burden of Being Burmese's] primary poetic habit is the list: thett's lists are slapstick, capacious, contradictory, free-wheeling, vengeful, and above all cannibalistic. If thett's ethic is based on eating everything, his poems attempt that impossible feat by piling it all into the stomach of the poem, each morsel separated only a comma.... Laughing along with thett may hurt. It may catch your throat. There is no promise of redemption here." -- Sean Pears, Jacket2 (March 2016)\n"[Thett] defines the burden of being Burmese through a deep and expansive dive into the quotidian particulars of life as a Burmese national, an expat, a political person, and a poet. ...buses, buskers, and bureaucracies emerge from the humid heat of the imagination. As Thett says, being Burmese is chance, but his poems are an ecumenical burden, an essential and exact experience of their own." -- Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers, Los Angeles Review of Books (November 2016)\nKo ko thett’s poems ― described by John Ashbery as “brilliantly off-kilter” ― bring oddball lists, linguistic inventiveness, and sardonic humor to the brutal contradictions of life and history in and outside of his native Burma. In some poems he muses on chairs or metaphors or potatoes, while elsewhere, and often with the same, dispassionate tone, he turns his gaze on a strangulating bureaucracy or the horrific treatment of prisoners. Thett writes in Burmese and in English. In this second volume to appear in English, most are English originals but thirteen will be presented bilingually on facing pages.