Master
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2022 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Terrance Hayes.
The debut collection from Simon Shieh, Master is a stark, surreal, and imagistic reckoning with a traumatic past. Master follows the speaker's struggle with masculinity from a martial arts school in upstate New York to a boxing academy in Beijing. Language emerges in this collection not as a neutral witness to a boy’s subjugation, but as the very tool of hegemony, though one which also holds the key to its own undoing, and therefore to freedom. As much as Master is the story of pain, it is also a journey to healing, illuminating that while violence can be our patrimony, it does not have to be our destiny.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The phenomenal debut from Shieh is a stark and extraordinary investigation of a painful past, traversing the intricacies of violence and the journey toward healing. The poems travel from an Upstate New York martial arts school to a boxing academy in Beijing, tracking the speaker's complicated relationship with masculinity while tackling personal trauma and the process of writing as a means of articulating and comprehending these experiences. "These poems are not about what happened to me; they are about the process of writing about what happened to me," Shieh explains in the book's "Notes." Throughout, he emphasizes writing's transformational power. "Mythomania" opens, "I imagine him reading this / telling me none of it happened... There is the story, and there is that which the story is constructed to hide. Of/ course, I want to side with neither—." He later writes, "I inscribe an image into the poem. In return, it inscribes a revelation into me." These memorable verses illustrate how writing may serve as both a refuge and a form of resistance, acknowledging the power of language to transform and heal.