Bamboophobia
Bilingual in Burmese and English
Ko ko thett’s poems — described by John Ashbery as “brilliantly off-kilter” — bring oddball lists, linguistic inventiveness, and sardonic humor to the brutal contradictions of life and history in and outside of his native Burma. In some poems he muses on chairs or metaphors or potatoes, while elsewhere, and often with the same, dispassionate tone, he turns his gaze on a strangulating bureaucracy or the horrific treatment of prisoners. Thett writes in Burmese and in English. In this second volume to appear in English, most are English originals but thirteen will be presented bilingually on facing pages.
ko ko thett’s poetic life was discreetly launched when he took it upon himself to edit a samizdat poetry collection at the Yangon Institute of Technology in Myanmar in 1994. After departing the country in 1997, thett began writing in English and has published in literary journals worldwide, from the Griffith Review to Granta. He won an English PEN translation award for the seminal anthology Bones will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets (ARC, UK), which he co-edited with James Byrne. His debut collection of poems in English, The Burden of Being Burmese (Zephyr, 2015), is listed on World Literature Today’s Nota Benes. His work has been widely anthologized and translated into several languages including Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese and Finnish. He is an Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa, poetry editor for Mekong Review and country editor for Myanmar at Poetry International [the Netherlands]. After a whirlwind tour of Asia, Europe and North America for two decades, thett happily resettled in Sagaing in his native Myanmar in 2017, where he published poetry books in Burmese. As of 2021 he is most likely to be spotted in the Golden Triangle of Norwich, UK. thett continues to write in both Burmese and English.
