Maw Shein Win is the author of Invisible Gifts: Poems and her chapbooks include Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. Maw is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito (2016-18). She lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.
With sharp focus and startling language, the poems in Maw Shein Win's second book, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, look through physical objects to glimpse the ephemeral, the material, and the immaterial. Vinyl records, felt wolverines, a belt used to punish children, pain pills, and "show dogs with bejeweled collars" crowd into Win's real and imagined storage units. Nats, Buddhist animist deities from her family's homeland of Burma, haunt the book's six sections. The nats, almost all of whom were once humans who died violently, inhabit the storage units and hover around objects while forgotten children sleep under Mylar blankets and daughters try to see through the haze of a father's cigarette smoke.
With sharp focus and startling language, the poems in Maw Shein Win's second book, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, look through physical objects to glimpse the ephemeral, the material, and the immaterial. Vinyl records, felt wolverines, a belt used to punish children, pain pills, and "show dogs with bejeweled collars" crowd into Win's real and imagined storage units. Nats, Buddhist animist deities from her family's homeland of Burma, haunt the book's six sections. The nats, almost all of whom were once humans who died violently, inhabit the storage units and hover around objects while forgotten children sleep under Mylar blankets and daughters try to see through the haze of a father's cigarette smoke.