Maw Shein Win in conversation with MK Chavez
City Lights and Omnidawn Books celebrate the publication of
Percussing the Thinking Jar
By Maw Shein Win
published by Omnidawn Press
With her latest collection, Maw Shein Win deftly braids together the pleasures, pains, and anxieties of living in an aging body, revealing how a mind can log thoughts and observations. Win employs new poetic forms to invite her readers into realms that are both deeply personal and universal, rendered with dreamlike imagery and surprising humor. Reflecting on our strange times and the atmospheric undercurrents of chaos and disintegration, Percussing the Thinking Jar is a hypnotic book and invites the reader into conversation with their own vulnerability and resilience. Throughout the book, sumi ink drawings by artist Mark Dutcher echo the rhythms of Win’s poetry.
Maw Shein Win’s most recent poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA’s Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literary community. To learn more about her work visit: mawsheinwin.com
MK Chavez is an art monster, writer, and educator. Chavez’s writing explores mixed-race identity, social justice, environmental resilience, horror cinema, magic, ritual, and the creative process. Chavez’s work has been recognized with the Pen Josephine Miles Award, the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award, and the Ruth Weiss Maverick Award. Chavez’s literary offerings include Dear Animal, Mothermorphosis, the lyric essay chapbook A Brief History of the Selfie, and Virgin Eyes. Recent work can be found on the walls of the art installation Manifest Differently.
Praise for Percussing the Thinking Jar
“Percussing the Thinking Jar is a marvel of lyric invention. The “thought logs” make stream of consciousness feel new. Stroke log, vertigo log, anxiety meditations, wild ideas: no idea or language is out of Win’s reach. This is original, gorgeous, engrossing poetry.”
—Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate, author of In Praise of Late Wonder, New and Selected Poems
“Lately I’ve been worrying about poetic style, which is a branched variation of the poet’s perpetual subject of worry, language. Maw Shein Win’s Percussing the Thinking Jar took me a step away from such worrying, weighted though the poems are with worry. Here are poems in which a love of the sounds and textures of words is manifestly a determining stylistic priority, poems that, consequently, are richly musical, and feature lines that expertly play their rhythms against each other–“vesper flux, pressure switch // I close my eyes & tap the lid.” How beautifully the ampersand in the second, iambic tetrameter line both acknowledges–insofar as it is as much a symbol as a syllable–and supplies the unstressed syllable missing in the first, not-quite iambic tetrameter line! I’m grateful for that music, that style. ”
—Shane McCrae, author of Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of A Kidnapping
“Percussing the Thinking Jar is a multisensory experience befitting Maw Shein Win, an artist who works and collaborates across disciplines and genres. An inventive collection of “logs” recorded over several years during and after lockdown, this book is a kind of Golden Record, snapshots of a restless roving mind trying to make sense of and connect to the world through personal and global cataclysms. Here, the mundane mingles with existential fears, medical procedures, contemporary art, apparitions of flora and fauna, and much more. Piercing reflections (“I am blinking into another eye.”) are juxtaposed with luscious phrases (“Vata & the Vine, Pitta of the Mind, Kapha & its Kind”), forming a haunting dreamscape that indeed “astonish[es] with sonic delight.”
—Jenny Qi, author of Focal Point
“Percussing the Thinking Jar is a breath of fresh air. A clarity. An order to the pandemonium of a global pandemic. Death becomes inescapable and each log constructs a life raft to navigate the uncertainty of being a body driven by its desire for aliveness. At any moment anything can happen, so why not let poetry happen? Why not fortify the isolated and aging body with “metaphor quarries”? With “hands [that] tremble quiet,” Maw Shein Win offers observations that defamiliarize and sensate narratives that bring new value to our “post-capitalist worth.” Percussing the Thinking Jar transforms human afflictions into a different organ for perception.”
—Arisa White, author of Who’s Your Daddy?
“In “Thought Log about Thought Logs,” the last poem in Maw Shein Win’s book, Percussing the Thinking Jar, the poet begins: “I started writing thought logs in spring 2020/Response to isolation, scatter, containment.” In her liminal poems, Win sensitively and precisely registers the pulse of living through the pandemic, alert to how daily life has changed, how magnified the smallest details have become, how “everything is phenomena,” and how nothing can “last forever.” Amidst the deaths and stillness, the nurse’s instructions, shopping for “peanut brittle online,” “mastering the art of doing nothing,” and listening to “roadrunners,” Win stays open to whatever the world throws at her, its gradations, shifts, and ruptures. This is a book to read and reread. It does something no other poetry book I have read does: it offers “diaphanous comfort” while we are at the “chaos party.” —John Yau, author of Tell it Slant
Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation