This pocket-sized paperback is one of the twenty-two titles published for 2015 Hong Kong International Poetry Nights. The theme of IPHHK2015 is “Poetry and Conflict”. 21 international poets from 18 different places are invited to participate in recitations, symposia and sharing sessions of the Poetry Nights. A recitation focusing on 10 local Hong Kong poets, “Hong Kong Cantonese Poetry Night” is included. This collection seeks to make accessible the best of contemporary international poetry with outstanding translations.
ko ko thett was born in 1972, and is a poet by choice and a Burman by chance. The poems in his first English-language collection, The Burden of Being Burmese (2015), range from “faddish sugar crystals,” written in Burmese for his illegal campus chapbook at the Yangon Institute of Technology in 1996, to his most recent work “anxiety attack,” constructed at the University of Leuven in 2014. He is co-editor of the seminal volume Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets (Northern Illinois University Press, 2013).