A Poetry Portfolio
- A Poetry Portfolio
In a literary address included in this special issue, poet Franny Choi says "(B)Aiiieeeee!" to a cis-het male vision of Asian American literature, proclaiming the future queer and femme. In the spirit of her address, this folio invokes a decidedly different Asian American poetic landscape than the one proffered in Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong's edited collection, Aiiieeeee! Its expansive focus includes queer, femme, gender nonbinary, mixed race, refugee, and adoptee poets of East, South, Southeast, West, and Central Asian descent; its poems span diverse aesthetics, intersectional politics, and contradictory subjectivities. The guiding impulse is not merely illuminatory or inclusive but decolonial. It asks us to see not only the erased but the practice of erasure and our respective roles in undoing that canonical violence—what more responsible reading and publishing practices might look like. [End Page 661]
cathy j. schlund-vials is professor of English and Asian/Asian American studies at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing and War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work; and editor or coeditor of Disability, Human Rights, and the Limits of Humanitarianism, Keywords for Asian American Studies, Asian America: A Primary Source Reader, Beiging of America: Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the Twenty-First Century, Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, and Redrawing the Historical Past: Multiethnic Graphic Narrative.
lawrence-minh bùi davis, ph.d., is curator of Asian Pacific American Studies at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and founding director of the Washington, D.C.-based arts nonprofit The Asian American Literary Review.
