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“[Treadwinds] fills an important corner not only of Lew's multifaceted career but the larger portrait of Korean and Asian-American literature of the past two decades.”—Publishers Weekly
The long-awaited first collection of Lew’s poems and intermedia pieces.
Since the early 1970s, the Korean American poet and scholar Walter K. Lew has produced innovative works ranging from linked-verse elegies for jazz musicians and multimedia “movietelling” performances to pioneering poetry anthologies and TV documentaries. Treadwinds collects much of Lew’s poetry for the first time and arranges it into five thematic sections: his family’s experience of Korea’s turbulent history; death; the aesthetics of music and painting; eroticism; and mal, which connotes Baudelarian evil in modernist literature, but means “language” in Korean.
Some poems include Korean and Japanese texts, while the title poem accompanies six collages by filmmaker Lewis Klahr. Evident throughout is Lew’s devotion to obscured aesthetic traditions, political critique, spiritual redemption and the creation of new meaning across media and between zones of culture.
“Editor and collagist, movieteller and translator, Lew is one of our most precious cultural resources. These wondrous fragments culled from over a quarter century of work are his multifaceted talents at their most finely honed. They can be read as film, history, miscellany — indeed, anything but "poetry," that is, the best definition of poetry we have.”—Alvin Lu, author of The Hell Screens
“This long-awaited collection of tantalizing poems does not disappoint. Whether the tongue is yanked out of the mouth by a crow, tasting a lover's taste, speaking one language or another, or story-telling with great pleasure —Lew presents us with poems that ripple with startling images and sounds and, ah! —with heart.”—Kimiko Hahn, author of Mosquito and Ant
One of four finalists in the Poetry Category for the Sixth Annual Asian American Literary Award, given by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. 2003
Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Poetry 2003
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