Percussing the Thinking Jar

Maw Shein Win

Paperback

Regular price$22.95With free membership trial$11.4850% off your first book+ Free shipping

In Stock– Ships within one business day

Do you recommend this book?

Yes!

A collection of dreamlike poetry, accompanied by ink drawings, reflecting on the experiences of living in an aging body.

With her latest collection, Maw Shein Win deftly braids together the pleasures, pains, and anxieties of living in an aging body, revealing how a mind can log thoughts and observations. Win employs new poetic forms to invite her readers into realms that are both deeply personal and universal, rendered with dreamlike imagery and surprising humor. Reflecting on our strange times and the atmospheric undercurrents of chaos and disintegration, Percussing the Thinking Jar is a hypnotic book and invites the reader into conversation with their own vulnerability and resilience. Throughout the book, sumi ink drawings by artist Mark Dutcher echo the rhythms of Win's poetry.

Book Details

Publisher: Omnidawn
Publish Date: Nov 19th, 2024
Pages: 180
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00lb
EAN: 9781632431608
Categories: • Women Authors• American - General

About the Author

Win, Maw Shein: - Maw Shein Win is the author of the chapbooks Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone and of poetry collections including Invisible Gifts and Storage Unit for the Spirit House, the latter also published by Omnidawn and nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She teaches at the University of San Francisco, was selected as a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree, and is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA.

Praise for this book

"Percussing the Thinking Jar is a marvel of lyric invention. The 'thought logs' make stream of consciousness feel new. Stroke log, vertigo log, anxiety meditations, wild ideas: no idea or language is out of Win's reach. This is original, gorgeous, engrossing poetry."--Lee Herrick, poet laureate of California and author of "Scar and Flower'

"Lately I've been worrying about poetic style, which is a branched variation of the poet's perpetual subject of worry, language. Win's Percussing the Thinking Jar took me a step away from such worrying, weighted though the poems are with worry. Here are poems in which a love of the sounds and textures of words is manifestly a determining stylistic priority, poems that, consequently, are richly musical, and feature lines that expertly play their rhythms against each other--'vesper flux, pressure switch // I close my eyes & tap the lid.' How beautifully the ampersand in the second, iambic tetrameter line both acknowledges--insofar as it is as much a symbol as a syllable--and supplies the unstressed syllable missing in the first, not-quite iambic tetrameter line! I'm grateful for that music, that style."--Shane McCrae, author of "Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of A Kidnapping"

"Percussing the Thinking Jar is a multisensory experience befitting Win, an artist who works and collaborates across disciplines and genres. An inventive collection of 'logs' recorded over several years during and after lockdown, this book is a kind of Golden Record, snapshots of a restless roving mind trying to make sense of and connect to the world through personal and global cataclysms. Here, the mundane mingles with existential fears, medical procedures, contemporary art, apparitions of flora and fauna, and much more. Piercing reflections are juxtaposed with luscious phrases, forming a haunting dreamscape that indeed astonish[es] with sonic delight.'"--Jenny Qi, author of "Focal Point"

"Percussing the Thinking Jar is a breath of fresh air. A clarity. An order to the pandemonium of a global pandemic. Death becomes inescapable and each log constructs a life raft to navigate the uncertainty of being a body driven by its desire for aliveness. At any moment anything can happen, so why not let poetry happen? Why not fortify the isolated and aging body with 'metaphor quarries'? With 'hands [that] tremble quiet, ' Win offers observations that defamiliarize and sensate narratives that bring new value to our 'post-capitalist worth.' Percussing the Thinking Jar transforms human afflictions into a different organ for perception."--Arisa White, author of "Who's Your Daddy?"

"In 'Thought Log about Thought Logs, ' the last poem in Win's book, Percussing the Thinking Jar, the poet begins: 'I started writing thought logs in spring 2020/Response to isolation, scatter, containment.' In her liminal poems, Win sensitively and precisely registers the pulse of living through the pandemic, alert to how daily life has changed, how magnified the smallest details have become, how 'everything is phenomena, ' and how nothing can 'last forever.' Amidst the deaths and stillness, the nurse's instructions, shopping for 'peanut brittle online, ' 'mastering the art of doing nothing, ' and listening to 'roadrunners, ' Win stays open to whatever the world throws at her, its gradations, shifts, and ruptures. This is a book to read and reread. It does something no other poetry book I have read does: it offers 'diaphanous comfort' while we are at the 'chaos party.'"--John Yau, author of "Tell it Slant"