Autumnal

Autumnal

$18.00

Written across fall and winter 2023, Autumnal is a daily reckoning with memory, exile, and devotion. Burmese-Chin poet Aidii composes from a life lived between the Chin hills, Yangon, and Indianapolis—a city now known as “Chindianapolis”, home to the largest Chin community outside Myanmar.

A poem a day, through falling leaves and deepening snow.

Her poems carry the hymnal pulse of tradition and the raw nerve of modern displacement. Like Emily Dickinson, whose disciplined practice she echoes, Aidii draws beauty and gravity from compressed forms. But hers is also a voice shaped by migration, single motherhood, diasporic resistance, and survivor guilt.

I need 314 hours a day
to be able to sleep sufficiently,
to play with my child, to make home.

Translated with care and poetic intuition by ko ko thett, Autumnal is a first-of-its-kind English-language collection from a Burmese woman poet writing on motherhood, faith, exile, and the brutal generosity of memory. This is poetry as lifeline, confession, and a bridge between cultures and memory.

SKU: 978-981-94-7319-9 Category:

Description

About the Author

Anna Biak Tha Mawi. Born in Hakha, the capital of Chin State in western Myanmar, Aidii was relocated as a child in Yangon, where she earned a B.A. in English, Liberal Arts Program (Myanmar Institute of Theology) in 2011. Since 2014 she has been running Aidii Weaving House in Hakha as a social enterprise to preserve the traditional art of Chin backstrap weaving and create employment opportunities for local Chin women. She has published six poetry collections in Yangon, in Chin lai, Burmese and English languages.

 

About the Translator 

ko ko thett (translator) is a Burma-born poet and poetry translator.
He has published and edited twelve poetry collections and translations in both Burmese and English. His translation work has been recognised with an English PEN Translates Award. His most recent poetry collection Bamboophobia (Zephyr Press, 2022) is shortlisted for the Walcott Prize. He lives between New Haven, US, and Norwich, UK.

 

Praise for the book 

Like a length of heritage textile for which the poet’s birthplace (in the Chin State of Myanmar) is renowned, the fabric of Autumnal unfolds skein by delicate skein, revealing a richness of fibre and sureness of skill in its making. Here are poems of recovery and creativity—­recovery from displacement and dispossession inflicted by political violence; creativity in fashioning a new life in a new world (Indianapolis in this case), a world where “motherhood is a house plant”, where “maple trees undress and reveal their bare branches” to make way for the “green nests of rest and asylum”, and where the taste of compensation is “like drinking another kind of wine”. This sensitively translated collection, the poet’s first to be published outside of Myanmar, deserves to count as a heritage textile of the proudest weave. —Wendy Law-Yone, Author of Golden Parasol: A Daughter’s Memoir

 

Aidii’s Autumnal invites us into the “cocoon of conscience”. Threaded through domestic routines in Indianapolis are memories of Hakha, in Chin state, and of yellow bougainvillea planted in memory of the passing of a fellow poet. What ensues is not a triumphant transformation of the psyche but a gently relentless attempt to bridge the distance between past and present, and two homes, both incomplete in vital ways. Leaves, the colour of blood, fall away with grace, to reveal the manner of living with loss. —Ann Ang, Literary scholar and researcher

 

Aidii’s nuanced, spare, and extraordinary poetry collection Autumnal explores the complex experience of artistic expression and single motherhood in diaspora. This work is emotionally intimate, rich with pain and elegiac celebration. Rapidly traversing time and place, these poems describe scenes of suburban Indianapolis, catalogue village gravestones in Myanmar, and lament lives and love cut short.

With images of unfulfilled longing—brutally pruned suburban trees, cigarettes without flame—the collection explores truncated passion and desire cut short. Moving between grief and joy, the mundane and the numinous, Aidii invites us into a rose garden behind a blue-green door where a woman stirs rice porridge “with a wooden ladle that might have been a boat paddle”. —Maw Shein Win, Author of Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn)

 

About Pagesetters

Established in 1989, Pagesetters Services is a content specialist focusing on print and digital publications. We are the proud owner of the Ethos Books imprint, an independent publisher of non-fiction, fiction and poetry.

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At Pagesetters, we make sure to listen first to the foundation of your ideas. Then, and only then, do we work to make sure that your project is brought to its full fruitful completion. This ensures that the core of your project is exactly that: the heart the drives the storytelling.

 

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Additional information

Weight.132 kg
Dimensions21 × 15 × .1 cm