The Truth In Rented Rooms

Praise for The Truth In Rented Rooms:
"Luckily it's the world. Miraculously, Koon Woon is alive in it, reminding us joyful and brilliant, sad as salt, untranslatable - live! Li Po in modern drag, the voice of New America, samo scrabbling to pay rent - Your father is buried in the same cemetery as Bruce Lee, you karate chop Whitman's block of wood, eat egg tarts to feel Chinese and buy a Japanese automatic rice cooker - perfect every time! The tradition of the wanderer is just a moment forever in the world's longest alley, under the table, the bubblegum kiss of the Tang dynasty - what a mess! Luckily, it's the world. Miraculously, Koon Woon has written The Truth. You read it!"
— Bob Holman, Author, In With the Out Crowd (Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records)

"Koon Woon, like Bob Kaufman, is a writer of solitudes. But like Walt Whitman, his solitudes contain multitudes. Join Koon Woon in his imaginings and enter into his room."
— Steve Cannon, Director, A Gathering of the Tribes

"These poems set a thousand horses galloping in the Asian diaspora in which so many are caught."
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Awards:
Winner, Josephine Miles Award from PEN Oakland Finalist, Norma Farber First Book Award, Poetry Society of America

Description:
Typed out in cramped tenement rooms or scrawled on bits of paper, Koon Woon's impulsive, startling poetry, collected for the first time in The Truth in Rented Rooms, probes the lonely world of itinerants and the dispossessed that is found in the shadows of immigrant life in the United States. His beat is one of narrow Chinatown alleyways and Greek diners, damp hotel rooms and emptying city parks. It is also a place of chance encounters and lingering epiphanies, pieced together through ruminations on Eastern and Western philosophical traditions, love and modal logic, present and past. Ranging in style from classical lyricism to syllabic construction to street shouting, Woon's poetry travels literally and figuratively beyond the constrained and finite world of the tenement poverty that is his subject to places distant - pre-Mao China, steel towns, a pastoral childhood. Woon's poetry - penetrating yet playful, and attuned to the breaks and charges of his own economic displacement and mental illness - attest to the regenerating eddies and convergences at the heart of a fully realized imagination.

Details:
$8.95 | 112pp | Paperback | ISBN 9781885030252