Maw Shein Win: Poet
We are delighted to announce a poet who will begin reading aloud from some of her selected works, and will appear on future episodes of Insight Myanmar Podcast, prior to the interview portion. Maw Shein Win is a Burmese American poet, editor, and educator who lives and teaches in the Bay Area. Her poetry has appeared in a wide range of publications, including several books featuring collections. She was a 2019 Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at UC Berkeley, and was the first poet laureate of El Cerrito, California.
Kim Shuck has commented, “Reading Maw Shein Win's poems is like visiting a museum of activated moments. These are observations on a human scale, something that might fit in a hand or a pocket. We are shown by the careful poet how these small things can thread together to make an emotion, a memory, a shiver. This is the restraint of a master of specificity and empathy.”
Maw Shein Win's recent poetry book is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, long-listed for the PEN America Open Book Award, and short-listed for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Here is one description of the work:
“With sharp focus and startling language, the poems in Maw Shein Win's second full- length book, Storage Unit for the Spirit House use physical objects to glimpse the ephemeral, the material, and the immaterial. Vinyl records, felt wolverines, a belt used to punish children, pain pills, and ‘show dogs with bejeweled collars’ crowd into Win's real and imagined storage units. Nats, Buddhist animist deities from her family’s homeland of Burma, haunt the book's six sections, as forgotten children sleep under Mylar blankets and daughters try to see through the haze of a father's cigarette smoke. The artful assemblages of both earthly and noncorporeal possessions throughout the collection become resonant and alive, and Win must summon "a circle of drums and copper bells" to appease the nats who have moved into a long-ago family house. This carefully curated collection of unlikely objects and images creates an act of ritual that uses language to interrogate how pain can transform into a nat or a siren. The minimal line length belies maximal imagination in this remarkable new book.”
D.A. Powell wrote of it, "Poetry has long been a vessel, a container of history, emotion, perceptions, keepsakes.…These poems are portals to other worlds and to our own, a space in which one sees and one is seen. A marvelous, timely, and resilient book."
Check out her books when you get a chance, and tune into our podcast episodes to hear her own voice in reading them!