Moon Fevers: Poems

Translating Feminisms showcases intimate collaborations and conversations between some of Asia’s most exciting women writers and emerging-star translators: contemporary poetry of labour and language, alongside essays exploring how, where and by whom feminist writing and female bodies are translated. For us at Tilted Axis Press, feminist publishing means working against the fetishisation of ‘oppression’ and demands that authors explicitly subscribe to what white women recognise as feminism, or even foreground their femaleness in their work. We work towards ensuring that the women we publish have the creative agency to contextualise their own work, resisting the commodification and/or erasure of their femaleness on their own terms. As part of Tilted Axis’s wider project of decolonisation through and of translation, and in response to seeing women authors of colour misread through a white feminist lens, we wanted to re-imagine the possibilities of a fully intersectional, international feminism. In the process, we’ve expanded our own conception of feminist writing and being – we hope these chapbooks will do the same for you. Nhã Thuyên has authored several books of poetry, short fiction and some tiny books for children. Translations of their poetry and writing appear in Poems of Lu Diu Vân, Lu Mêlan & Nhã Thuyên (Vagabond Press, 2013) and in journals including RHINO Poetry, Asymptote, Eleven Eleven, Cordite Review, Sand, Full Stop, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Tongue, Asian American Writers Workshop. Their most recent poetry book words breathe, creatures of elsewhere (t th, nhng ngi l) was published in Vietnamese (Nha Nam, 2015) and in English translation by Kaitlin Rees (Vagabond Press, 2016). With Rees, they founded AJAR, a small bilingual publisher with an online journal and a mini-poetry festival in Hanoi. Nhã Thuyên is shaping a book of essays on absent presences in contemporary Vietnamese poetry and a book of nonsense poeticized prose for which Kaitlin Rees, the translator, was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant in 2017.