Ishle Yi Park's book release : The Temperature of This Water: May 18, 2004

The Temperature of This Water: Ishle Yi Park's book release


Kearny Street Workshop and Locus Arts present a book release for poet Ishle Yi Park's "The Temperature of This Water" from Kaya Press (NYC).

With the clairvoyant double vision that arises from being caught between
two cultures, Park illustrates what it is like to be a young Korean
immigrant in New York City who daily sees the lives of her family cracked
open as much by love as by overwork, violence, and racism. Throughout the
collection the native language and culture she fights to keep sacred and
visible is intertwined with her own ambition and sadness about the corner
store fate of many of her relatives. The book is as much about learning
how to struggle as it is learning what struggles are truly ours.

Park's vision encompasses the lovers, criminals, mothers, and gangbangers
who live behind the closed doors of New York City immigrant life. Whether
tracing the paths of prisoners meeting girlfriends, Korean comfort women,
or .44s shot from rooftops in Brooklyn, Park's passion and uncompromising
honesty lays bare the ruined heart of a city still pulsing with light.

"Ishle Yi Park is a brilliant young poet: fiery, intelligent, raw, funny,
brave. She brings a new and powerful energy to American poetry, smashing
to pieces the mask of Korean-American stereotype. Listen to this soaring
voice, this beautiful and terrible song of the city. An extraordinary
debut." - Martin Espada

About the Artist
Ishle Park is a Korean American woman born and raised in New York. A
recipient of a fiction grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts
and a Gregory Millard Fellow, her work has been published in over 20
anthologies, including The Beacon Best of 2001 and The Best American
Poetry of 2003, edited by Pulitzer-prize winning Yosuf Komunyakaa.

Park has performed at over one hundred venues across the United States,
Cuba and Korea. She is the first Korean American woman ever to compete
and feature on the finals stage at the National Poetry Slam. She was
featured on HBO's Russell Simmons Presents: Def Poetry Jam, and recently
appeared on the NAACP Image Awards reading a tribute poem to Venus and
Serena Williams. She has been written about in The Economist, Asianweek,
The Black Scholar Review, and The San Francisco Guardian, Snd has aired
nationally on FOX, Gotham TV and HBO.
The Temperature of This Water is her first book.
May 18, 2004, 8pm
Galeria de la Raza 2857 24th Street (@ Bryant)