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Goddess of Democracy : An Occupy Lyric by Henry Wei Leung (2017, Trade Paperback)

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New Trade paperback

About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherOmnidawn Publishing

ISBN-101632430401

ISBN-139781632430403

eBay Product ID (ePID)237464622

Product Key Features

Book TitleGoddess of Democracy : an Occupy Lyric

Number of Pages128 Pages

LanguageEnglish

TopicAmerican / Asian American, General, Subjects & Themes / General

Publication Year2017

GenrePoetry

AuthorHenry Wei Leung

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height0.4 in

Item Weight6.1 Oz

Item Length9 in

Item Width6 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2017-020695

Reviews"These reflective last lines, "even I spend my best years / in a golden future's cage" sit the reader squarely in impassibility: the promise of a better tomorrow can become today's trap. Through a present tense, imperfect statement, not "I spent my best years" or "I had been spending my best years," but "I spend" as in "I am now spending," Leung underscores the complexity of the cage's confines.", "Leung draws his passion for writing from a natural hunger to create and to express-not from the confines of academics, though he appreciates its rigor. He combines course studies with self-education, which he achieves by an insatiable appetite for literature."- University of Hawai'i News, The poems in this collection are intimate and deeply moving, writing as both witness but inquisitor as well, articulating grief, horror and trauma, as well as an appreciation for the small mercies possible through and around the fragile question of democracy. His poems offer neither shortcut nor solution, but articulate a restlessness and deep attention; writing not to argue what to do through moving forward, but the possibility of moving forward at all, leaving nothing and no one behind., Henry Wei Leung's Goddess of Democracy explores Hong Kong's political uncertainties as primarily exposed by the Umbrella Revolution, deploying sophisticated poems fraught with political (and personal) ambivalences that he grounds through copious journalistic explanations of various events via epigraphs and one dedicated prose section. Through this simple combination of lyric and documentation, Leung's book simultaneously seeks and challenges the viability of the historical moment as one supposedly situated within a coherent political narrative. It sings the anger of revolution, but with a distinct dissonance, a song that both wavers on the edges of noise and is attenuated by memory's density., Addressed to the Goddess of Democracy,...[Lueng] bears witness to the ongoing struggle for human rights up to the 2014 Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong. We experience the protests at street level through a 'torn off' I both inside and outside the movement: 'I myself have been here:/ been a hollowing throng of sweat/ ...I stood among and gave you/ neither stay nor shore nor help.' Throughout, there's a grappling, an urgency, and a passion that makes the experience very real. VERDICT: Sometimes challenging, but a strong testimony in verse for those interested in both poetry and politics., ". . . Leung uses the deeply symbolic statue known as the Goddess of Democracy as the focal point for thoughts on such issues as the misinterpretation or misrepresentation of a social movement and what it means to take a political stand. What makes this collection magnetic is the measured way that Leung unpacks his own roles--witness, outsider, American, and translator--in the Hong Kong protests. "I can't declare myself 'for' or 'against,' " Leung writes. "These two words are as useless as 'us' and 'them' in the face of understanding, in the face of all our failures to understand each other."

SynopsisSelected by Cathy Park Hong as winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize Written in and of the protest encampments of one of the most sophisticated Occupy movements in recent history, Goddess of Democracy attempts to understand the disobedience and desperation implicated in a love for freedom. Part lyric, part autoethnography, part historical document, these poems orbit around the manifold erasures of the Umbrella protests in Hong Kong in 2014. Leung, who was in those protests while on a Fulbright grant, navigates the ethics of diasporic dis-identity, of outsiderness and passing, of privilege and the pretension of understanding, in these poems that ask: "what is / freedom when divorced from / from?"

LC Classification NumberPS3612.E9214A6 2017