Death in Summer - by Maung Day (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In this collection of visceral, dreamlike prose poems and chimeric ink drawings, Burmese poet and artist Maung Day creates a haunting portrait of how political violence and oppression in Myanmar has permeated the everyday lives of its citizens. Exploring family history alongside turbulent current events and historical atrocities, these surreal, at times disorienting poems interweave the gritty and realistic with the fantastic and absurd, delivering personal and powerful social commentary. Maung Day's ninth book of poems, Death in Summer is his first full-length collection written in English and the first time his art and poetry have been published side-by-side.

Review Quotes

Out of tragedy arrives a dreamscape, out of ruin of history comes poetry that changes our perspective on ourselves. Is this surrealism? Perhaps. But I happen to feel it is a way of seeing the misfortune of the world with defiant hope that imagination is possible in days to come - and, frankly, it is all we have to get us through. Maung Day wrote a very beautiful book, and I, for one, am grateful.
-Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

Maung Day is a visionary, one of the most original poets writing today. In this collection, he captures the grief of refugees as well as those who never leave their beloved, war-torn homes. These poems teem, often overflowing with life even as they acknowledge that death is never far away. Sparrows as large as houses, corpses that complain about the mud, a magician that disappears into a horse - Maung Day's creations are vivid, sharp, and true even in their wildest forms.
-Erica Wright, author of Snake

Ancestral parables, psychohistorical visions and apparitions, Maung Day's Death in Summer puts forward the idea of the surreal as disturbingly more real ... This is a beautifully ambidextrous, innovative poetics of both documentation and transformation; a summoning for any serious reader of poetry. Here, we encounter children carrying cities inside their bodies, King Mindon walking in the skin of his soldiers, and the eyes of flies taking photos of the dead. Accompanied by a suite of exceptional drawings to alternate with the poems themselves, Maung Day confirms that he is a complete artist, sensitive to those who suffer from oppression and subtly calling out injustice. If you want to know one of the great poets writing from Myanmar today, you would do well to start here.
-James Byrne, author of Everything Broken Up Dances

Maung Day is a poet of fire. At times the poems in Death in Summer explode with great energetic leaps; at other times they sizzle away with a slow burn in terse prose sentences. In either case, "The flames snap at the night sky with their exquisite teeth," and I love these poems for their human warmth, their skiey leaps, and their imaginative fierceness.
-Nathan Hoks, author of Nests in Air

Alongside Maung Day's phantasmagorical illustrations, the poems in Death in Summer reach out to us from a mysterious place of grief and beauty. I found myself returning to lines as if they were talismans, turning them over in my mind the way one would examine an exquisite scarab. This collection holds an inscrutable wisdom from which we can all benefit.
-Catherine Bresner, author of the empty season

In his debut full-length collection in English, Death in Summer, Burmese poet Maung Day confronts trauma and political repression in a series of deadpan prose poems that expose the absurdity of narrative logic in a world of senseless violence. Here, "[a] madman builds a town in his head, and a boy goes to school in that town." Elsewhere we learn of "a school for children with no tongues" in which "the school teaches only one subject: patience." Flies can lift a carcass or take a photo of a dead man with their eyes. For Maung Day, there are no sanctuaries: schools, hospitals, and even the countryside can be perilous. Early on, the speaker pleads, "I want to leave this place. It doesn't understand my eyes." Punctuated by arresting, hand-drawn illustrations, Maung Day's urgent book envisions alien-like myth-making as a source of tentative relief.
-James Shea, author of The Lost Novel

The figures of humans, of bird-humans, of beast-men, of various apparitions in Maung Day's ink-on-paper drawings have a strangely familiar and lonely appearance, as if they were our previous lives or distant ancestors ... The peculiar, uncanny, and restless air of Maung Day's poetry crept into my body.
-Nhã Thuyên, author of words breathe, creatures of elsewhere

About the Author

Maung Day is a Burmese poet, artist, and translator. He lives and works in Yangon, Burma/Myanmar.