Bones Will Crow - Paperback

by Ko Ko Thett (Editor), James Byrne (Editor)

This is the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poets published in the United States and it includes the work of Burmese poets who have been in exile and in prison. The poems include global references from a culture in which foreign books and the Internet are regarded with suspicion and where censorship is an industry. The poets have been ingenious in their use of metaphor to escape surveillance and censorship, writing post-modern, avant-garde, performance, and online poetries. The anthology reveals the transition of Burmese poetry from traditionalism to modernism, as well as the development of Burmese poetry over the second half of the twentieth century, as Myanmar has changed. Through their wildly diverse styles, these poems delight in the freedom to experiment with poetic tradition.

Author Biography

ko ko thett grew up in Burma. By the early 1990s, he was thoroughly poeticized and politicized at Rangoon Institute of Technology. In 1996 he published and clandestinely distributed two uncensored chapbooks on the campus. He left the country in 1997 following a brief detention for his role in the December 1996 student uprising in Rangoon. ko ko thett has written extensively for several Burma journals and leading papers in Finland.

James Byrne is the editor and co-founder of The Wolf poetry magazine. His debut collection, Passages of Time, was published by Flipped Eye in 2003. Blood / Sugar is his second collection. He is also the co-editor of Voice Recognition, an anthology of British and Irish poets under 35, and The Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees.