Books

In a daring first book that challenges contemporary poetic practice and pieties, Anita Feng speaks in a voice completely different from her own, submerging her gender, race, and nationality in these powerful and sensitive poems. In Internal Strategies, she tells the story of her husband, Xiao Ge Feng, who was born at the outset of communist rule in Beijing, China, and who grew up on succeeding waves of patriotic fervor, disillusionment, disaster, and inner strength. These poems, in Ms. Feng's convincing rendering of Xiao Ge's voice, follow the course of his life from severe childhood illness to forced labor in Manchuria, through factory work and his efforts to educate himself, to his immigration to the United States for study at a university where he met and married the author. Against the backdrop of China's ancient customs and recent political history, Internal Strategies goes beyond a narrative of one man's struggles into serious issues of cultural and personal identity. Anita Feng's poems pose such essential questions as "what are the perimeters of experience" and "to whom does history belong," even as they brilliantly transcend the topical events out of which they arise, combining fact and lyric imagery to animate a single life and an entire world.

From the back cover:

Who would have thought the industrial Midwest could be the source of so much fine poetry? In another story of slight rise and long decline, Anita Feng’s Sadie & Mendel does for a Jewish mother and son in Detroit what Rita Dove’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah did for an African American couple in Akron. In a variety of voices, and with crisp narrative lines, Feng unfolds a tale that begins with Sadie’s life in a peasant village near the Black Sea and ends with her death, "the other shore." It is a saga of ambition and disappointment, from one generation to the next. At Mendel’s birth, the question arises, "Can one be born / with a . air for misfortune?" And an answer seems to come when Mendel, in middle age, looks around and sees "a raw thing diminished / to the size of regret." But the reader will not regret—nor forget—Anita Feng’s powerful poems that open up this failed family, the "big American dreams" and the deep American sadness.

—Elton Glaser

			Books
Home News Calendar Biography Reviews Contacts Ocarinas		Internal Strategies Akron Series in Poetry University of Akron Press ISBN 1-884836-14-3 Buy The Book Sadie & Mendel Winner of the Backwaters Press Prize 2005 Backwaters Press ISBN 0-9785782-0-1 Buy The Book	From the back cover: In a daring first book that challenges contemporary poetic practice and pieties, Anita Feng speaks in a voice completely different from her own, submerging her gender, race, and nationality in these powerful and sensitive poems. In Internal Strategies, she tells the story of her husband, Xiao Ge Feng, who was born at the outset of communist rule in Beijing, China, and who grew up on succeeding waves of patriotic fervor, disillusionment, disaster, and inner strength. These poems, in Ms. Feng's convincing rendering of Xiao Ge's voice, follow the course of his life from severe childhood illness to forced labor in Manchuria, through factory work and his efforts to educate himself, to his immigration to the United States for study at a university where he met and married the author. Against the backdrop of China's ancient customs and recent political history, Internal Strategies goes beyond a narrative of one man's struggles into serious issues of cultural and personal identity. Anita Feng's poems pose such essential questions as "what are the perimeters of experience" and "to whom does history belong," even as they brilliantly transcend the topical events out of which they arise, combining fact and lyric imagery to animate a single life and an entire world. From the back cover: Who would have thought the industrial Midwest could be the source of so much fine poetry? In another story of slight rise and long decline, Anita Feng’s Sadie & Mendel does for a Jewish mother and son in Detroit what Rita Dove’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah did for an African American couple in Akron. In a variety of voices, and with crisp narrative lines, Feng unfolds a tale that begins with Sadie’s life in a peasant village near the Black Sea and ends with her death, "the other shore." It is a saga of ambition and disappointment, from one generation to the next. At Mendel’s birth, the question arises, "Can one be born / with a . air for misfortune?" And an answer seems to come when Mendel, in middle age, looks around and sees "a raw thing diminished / to the size of regret." But the reader will not regret—nor forget—Anita Feng’s powerful poems that open up this failed family, the "big American dreams" and the deep American sadness. —Elton Glaser