The Burden of Being Burmesedisplays an extraordinary fertile and febrile imagination—one that will both delight and disturb American readers. —Marjorie Perloff
A brilliantly off-kilter book. —John Ashbery
Ko Ko Thett writes that he is a poet by choice and a Burmese by chance. The poems in this collection—the first major volume in English by a contemporary Burmese poet—range from faddish sugar crystals, written in Burmese for his 1996 illegal campus chapbook in Yangon, to his autumn 2014 anxiety attack in the Netherlands, where he now lives. Thett is the co-editor and translator of the seminal volumeBones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets.
Ko Ko Thett is a poet by choice and a Burmese by chance. The poems in this collection, many of which have appeared in English-language literary magazines worldwide, range from “faddish sugar crystals,” written in Burmese for his 1996 illegal campus chapbook at the Yangon Institute of Technology, to his autumn 2014 “anxiety attack” at the University of Leuven. Apart from his own work as a writer and translator, he is the co-editor and translator of the seminal volume Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets, (ARC, 2012; Northern Illinois University Press 2013).
Ko Ko Thett is one of the most well-established contemporary Burmese poets. He writes comfortably in both Burmese and English, and he also has a strong reputation as being one of Burma's finest translators and editors. A vast majority of contemporary Burmese writing that has found its way into English translation and publication has been at the hands of Ko Ko Thett. He is also integrally linked to contemporary political movements in Burma (having spent a number of months in prison in Yangon) and is actively working on the development of the new Burma/Myanmar. This book is significant as the first single-author collection in English by a Burmese poet, tlƒ1
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