Original Music inspired by Shin Yu Pai's Virga

October 29th ⎮7:30pm

The Bushwick Book Club Seattle Presents

Original music inspired by Shin Yu Pai’s Virga

Parking info below (open till midnight, within 3 blocks of the venue, and west of 3rd avenue)

VIRGA, Shin Yu Pai’s elegant eleventh collection of poems, is a crisp and intelligent response to recent and ancient history. In poems at once visionary and practical, VIRGA portrays Buddhist thought from lived experience, and demonstrates the everyday life of a poet who can see for herself in the “shafts of rain going sublime” the reality of being an Asian American woman in America today. This collection rediscovers who we are in an age when hate-crimes and terrorization destroy the lives of Asians and all people of color. Experiencing these poems, we witness Shin Yu Pai rise in and through the wearying atmosphere of the “dominant caste,” as historian Isabel Wilkerson calls white culture, to hold herself, her child, her community, in that sublime state that, within the Zen mind, arises “before touching the ground.”

一
 

virga

as young people we are
taught to hold our tears

the feeling that could not
come to pass in the thundering

fallstreak, in piercing through virgae
we risk the jet plane flaming out

shafts of rain going sublime,
before ever touching ground

if this is dormancy, the self
unrequited, who would we be

if we became cloudburst?
consider the potted plant in the crook

whose roots could grow no deeper
its refusal to bloom & choosing

instead to shrivel; the lesson
now to pour down and resound

二

Readings by Shin Yu Pai

Performers include: No-No Boy, Leanna Keith, Whiting Tennis, Levi Fuller, Carrie Wicks and Kyle Hanson.

Check it out: Small Press Distribution

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Purchase the book HERE

Parking information for the event:

We know downtown might feel a little different these days.
Here are a few options to park that are open till midnight, within 3 blocks of the venue, and west of 3rd avenue. Please consider one of these spots.