Bamboophobia - by Ko Ko Thett (Paperback)

About the Book

One of Burma's foremost poets writes daring, experimental poems that combine light-hearted word play with deadly serious subjects.

Book Synopsis

Ko 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.

Review Quotes

"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)

"[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)

"[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)

About the Author

ko ko thett's poetic life was discreetly launched when he took it upon himself to edit a samizdat poetry collection at the Yangon Institute of Technology in Myanmar in 1994. After departing the country in 1997, thett began writing in English and has published in literary journals worldwide, from the Griffith Review to Granta. He won an English PEN translation award for the seminal anthology Bones will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets (ARC, UK), which he co-edited with James Byrne. His debut collection of poems in English, The Burden of Being Burmese (Zephyr, 2015), is listed on World Literature Today's Nota Benes. His work has been widely anthologized and translated into several languages including Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese and Finnish. He is an Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa, poetry editor for Mekong Review and country editor for Myanmar at Poetry International [the Netherlands]. After a whirlwind tour of Asia, Europe and North America for two decades, thett happily resettled in Sagaing in his native Myanmar in 2017, where he published poetry books in Burmese. As of 2021 he is most likely to be spotted in the Golden Triangle of Norwich, UK. thett continues to write in both Burmese and English.