Bodega: Poems

(Paperback)

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Finalist for the 2021 Kate Tufts Discovery Award

Winner of the 2020 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry

Against the backdrop of the war on drugs and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, a Korean girl comes of age in her parents bodega in the Queensbridge projects, offering a singular perspective on our nation of immigrants and the tensions pulsing in the margins where they live and work.

In Su Hwangs rich lyrical and narrative poetics, the bodega and its surrounding neighborhoods are cast not as mere setting, but as an ecosystem of human interactions where a dollar passed from one stranger to another is an act of peaceful revolution, and desperate acts of violence are the price / of doing business in the projects where we / were trapped inside human cagesbinding us / in a strange circus where atoms of haves / and have-nots always forcefully collide. These poems also reveal stark contrasts in the domestic lives of immigrants, as the speakers own family must navigate the many personal, cultural, and generational chasms that arise from having to assume a hyphenated identitylending a voice to the traumatic toll invisibility, assimilation, and sacrifice take on so many pursuing the American Dream.

We each suffer alone in / tandem, Hwang declares, but inBodega, she has written an antidote to this solitary hurtan incisive poetic debut that acknowledges and gives shape to anguish as much as it cherishes human life, suggesting frameworks for how we might collectively move forward with awareness and compassion.

Reviews

These poems feel right on time. --Boston Globe

We admired Bodega tremendously for its tireless, exemplary formal invention which is not only a marvel for its own sake, but in Hwang's hands, it also becomes a dazzling analog for the many-ness and energy of our nation's urban spaces. Su Hwang is gifted with the art to turn the mundane into the powerfully poetic. --2021 Kate Tufts Discovery Award Selection Committee, Finalist

In Su Hwang's intricate debut, the bodega is a vantage point for 'taking stock of these terrible/ hierarchies' of race, privilege and immigration . . . She asks readers to hear rather than understand 'the gibberish/ of anguish' spilling from dislocation and trauma. --Minneapolis Star Tribune

These poems demand to be sounded-out and savored . . . the narrative eye and ear is gentle, encompassing, hypnotic. --The Millions

In this formally dexterous debut, Hwang interrogates language, identity, and cultural inheritance . . . This work succeeds in using the nuances of poetic technique to amplify an already powerful message of cultural identity. --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Bodega is one of the most experimental and ambitious projects that I have encountered. Hwang, like her immigrant parents who moved to an unknown land, takes a risk by experimenting with form, making innovative aesthetic choices, and writing sweeping narrative-driven poems . . . The poems in Bodega are vulnerable, baring open a raw portrayal of immigration and assimilation. --The Rumpus

An incisive poetic debut that gives shape to anguish as much as it cherishes human life, Bodega offers a singular perspective on immigration, race, identity, and domesticity through the lens of a coming-of-age narrative. --American Poets

[Bodega] . . . is both intimate and universal, harnessing the magic of childhood to draw readers into the stories of [Hwang's] immigrant parents and neighbors. --MPR's All Things Considered

Bodega takes place in 1992 during the Los Angeles Riots, with the war on drugs as its backdrop. Set in the speaker's neighborhood bodega, these narratives consistently and smoothly shift structure and form, complicating the American story as it foregrounds the immigration experience. --Chicago Review of Books

Bodega is a stirring debut that testifies to the power of the imagination that glints and glitters among the shards of the American Dream. --Hyphen

To read Bodega by Su Hwang is to immerse oneself in a world . . . cutting through the fog of ignorance, shining outward from within so that others can see more clearly. --Green Mountains Review

Audacity. Tenacity. Originality. Craft. Bodega earns its place in American letters. --The Rumpus

"If we are not in denial, to name one life, one narrative, we must name many. This is a responsibility that Su Hwang steps into with elegant care. Her poems in Bodega are observant and cinematic, tracing the ways our many-languaged lives come up against each other in these united states. I've been waiting for a collection like this, difficult and prismatic as it is."--Solmaz Sharif

"Su Hwang's poems reenergize our communal memories of family and culture. She weaves story with perception and the result is the emergence of a poet whose instinct raises personal language to a fresh level. This unforgettable book places the poet in the forefront of experience and convinces me that Audre Lorde was correct when she stated, generations ago, that 'poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.'"--Ray Gonzalez

"Splashed against a milieu of suspicion, shift, and tumult, these keenly honed narratives--crafted by a poet bristling with unassailable talent--are the testimonies of a child very much within and without a 'home' in the traditional sense. What Su Hwang has done is chronicle a small, utterly necessary life as it stumbles toward its root in a world that both abandons and embraces. You will be pulled relentlessly into these stanzas and you will see yourself here."--Patricia Smith

"If, as Wittgenstein posited, words are probes capable of reaching great depths, then Su Hwang's Bodega is a quarry--mining directly into the immigrant heart, the daughter's heart, the American heart. A Barbie is burned and buried 'without pomp or ballyhoo, ' the earth 'slackens, ' to then reveal a 'map of storied constellations, ' and a mother cleans her daughter's ear with a wood pen: 'a / series of tiny / digs.' Real excavation always rends and breaks and works to bring something new into the light. I am grateful for this book, for all of Hwang's illuminations."--Kaveh Akbar

"Through the poetry of family and community, the collective and the self, Su Hwang's Bodega delivers an unflinching lyric missive to, and for, the complicated hearts that power a city--those whose voices and lives, beautifully and resolutely rendered, defy dismissal."--Khadijah Queen

Author Bio

Born in Seoul, Korea, Su Hwang was raised in New York, then called the Bay Area home before transplanting to the Midwest, where she received her MFA in poetry from the University of Minnesota. Hwang is a recipient of the inaugural Jerome Hill Fellowship in Literature, the Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize, and writer-in-residence fellowships to Dickinson House and Hedgebrook, among others. Her poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Water~Stone Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and is the cofounder, with Sun Yung Shin, of Poetry Asylum. Hwang currently lives in Minneapolis.