Frank Carlson Library

Explores the role of rhetoric and the racial classification of Asian American immigrants in the early twentieth century. From 1870 to 1940, racial eligibility for naturalization in the United States was limited to "free white persons" and "aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent," and many interpreted these restrictions to reflect a policy of Asian exclusion based on the conclusion that Asians were neither white nor African. Because...

No one is safe in the world of Sabrina Guo's electrifying debut, Catalogue of Ripening. The village fish are poisoned with mercury. Children rehearse their endings with lockdown drills. A seawall becomes the sea. Balancing narrative impulse and lyric flair, Guo takes us on a journey from childhood to adolescence, from innocence to knowledge-the world no longer a site of wonder but corruption, contamination, cancer. Through poems that realize the world's...

A free verse collection of modern poetry, Ruinous takes readers through cycles of depression, growth, hurt, and healing. If you are searching for your next read in dark poetry, look no further. Disaster pulsing Always beneath my skin, Downfall breathing in my ears Sweet promises. The raging, biting, scraping Inside my veins-It is constant. If I would loose That choking, biting control-If I only set free The claws grasping, holding My bones, my...

Challenging the commonly held perception that immigrants' lives are shaped exclusively by their sending and receiving countries, Here, There, and Elsewhere breaks new ground by showing how immigrants are vectors of globalization who both produce and experience the interconnectedness of societies-not only the societies of origin and destination, but also, the societies in places beyond. Tahseen Shams posits a new concept for thinking about these places...

There is no way that thirteen-year-old wallflower me could conceive of a day when I would dance-voluntarily-in the halftime show of the Chinese University Basketball Association championship that was broadcast to millions of people. But I did. My memoir Unbound Feet: Finding Freedom in Communist China chronicles this miraculous transformation. Teaching at an international university in Henan Province comes with perks, and drawbacks. The college was...

Thousand Star Hotel confronts the silence around racism, police brutality, and the invisibility of the Asian American urban poor. From with thanks to Sahra Nguyen for the "refugee style slogan": They give the kids candy to bet. My daughter loses the first four rounds, she's a quiet wire as they take her candy away, piece by piece. When she finally wins, I ask if she wants to play again. "No!" she shouts, grabbing her candy, "I want to go home!" True...

In 1942, Eileen Simpson-then Eileen Mulligan-married John Berryman. Both were in their twenties; Eileen had just graduated from Hunter College and John had but one slim volume of poetry to his name. They moved frequently-from New York to Boston, then Princeton-chasing jobs, living simply, relying on the hospitality of more successful friends like Robert Lowell and Jean Stafford, or R. P. Blackmur and his wife, Helen. Rounding out their circle of intimates...

In the deeply personal Decade of the Brain, Janine Joseph writes of a newly-naturalized American citizen who suffers from post-concussive memory loss after a major auto accident. The collection is an odyssey of what it means to recover-physically and mentally-in the aftermath of trauma and traumatic brain injury, charting when "before" crosses into "after." Through connected poems, buckling and expansive syntax, ekphrasis, and conjoined poetic forms,...

The long-awaited memoir by Fang Lizhi, the celebrated physicist whose clashes with the Chinese regime helped inspire the Tiananmen Square protests Fang Lizhi was one of the most prominent scientists of the People's Republic of China; he worked on the country's first nuclear program and later became one of the world's leading astrophysicists. His devotion to science and the pursuit of truth led him to question the authority of the Communist regime....

Everything She Touched recounts the incredible life of the American sculptor Ruth Asawa. This is the story of a woman who wielded imagination and hope in the face of intolerance and who transformed everything she touched into art. In this compelling biography, author Marilyn Chase brings Asawa's story to vivid life. She draws on Asawa's extensive archives and weaves together many voices-family, friends, teachers, and critics-to offer a complex and...