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2 books match the query 'Sze, Arthur'

cover of The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems

The White Orchard

Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems

Arthur Sze

Museum of New Mexico Press, 2025

A poet’s creative process comes to light in this latest book by National Book Award recipient Arthur Sze. Sze has assembled an illuminating selection of seven interviews, three essays, and poems to examine the evolution of his compositions, his decades teaching poetry, and his deep connection to the cultures and landscape of New Mexico.
          A son of Chinese immigrants who was born and raised in New York City and on Long Island, Sze first studied science at MIT. His call to write poetry pulled him away from that academic pursuit, but the sciences would continue to influence his writing. In 2024, Sze received the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award for The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press). Sze spent over two decades as an educator, teaching creative writing and poetry to Indigenous students from across America at Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). In this compilation, Sze is interviewed by his former IAIA student, award-winning Diné poet, editor, and visual artist Esther Belin.
Sze’s fluency in his parents’ native tongue, along with study at the University of California at Berkeley, allowed him to delve into Chinese poetry, both as a student and translator of classical and contemporary works. The White Orchard shows his wider connection to Asian American poetry across the United States and how he has drawn inspiration from translating Chinese poetry into English. Arthur Sze is one of our finest poets, and this collection demonstrates how literature can enrich us all.
 
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cover of Water's Edge: Writing on Water

Water's Edge

Writing on Water

Edited by Lenore Manderson and Forrest Gander

Northwestern University Press, 2023

A wide-ranging consideration of water’s plenitude and paucity—and of our relationship to its many forms

Water is quotidian, ubiquitous, precious, and precarious. With their roots in this element, the authors of Water’s Edge reflect on our natural environment: its forms, textures, and stewardship. Born from a colloquium organized by the editors at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, the anthology features a diverse group of writers and artists from half a dozen countries, from different fields of scholarship and practice: artists, biologists, geologists, poets, ecocritics, actors, and anthropologists. The contributors explore and celebrate water while reflecting on its disturbances and pollution, and their texts and art play with the boundaries by which we differentiate literary forms.

In the creative nonfiction, poetry, and visual art collected here, water moves from backdrop to subject. Ashley Dawson examines the effects of industrial farming on the health of local ecosystems and economies. Painter Kulvinder Kaur Dhew captures water’s brilliance and multifaceted reflections through a series of charcoal pieces that interlace the collection. Poet Arthur Sze describes the responsibility involved in the careful management of irrigation ditches in New Mexico. Rather than concentrating their thoughts into a singular, overwhelming argument, the authors circulate moments of apprehension, intimation, and felt experience. They are like tributaries, each carrying, in a distinctive style, exigent and often intimate reports concerning a substance upon which all living organisms depend.

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