Full 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.
Contents
Table of Contents
Kindness Comes Too Easily to Wicked Men
Part I
Act I
Master (Five Nocturnes)
Drawing of a Skeleton
Reverence
Descendent
every scar is an eye which has seen too much
Part II
Ripening
Patrimony
after seven days I hear his voice
Testing the Waters
Self-Defense
Obsession
Clearing the Hills
What is Is Left
Part III
Mythomania
Day One
Specter
Feel Him Out
Training in Yizhuang
He Says My Name
The Queen's Birthday, Bangkok (2011)
Cutting Weight
Record
To hide from the dead / To be with the living
Absolution
Self-Portrait
