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Mining
Company Guide to Poetry by Bob Holman (March 9, 1999)
When Koon Woon writes of looking out his “11th floor highrise window / Below the
hit of hills / and above the grumbling / of warehouses in the demise / And you always
lose money / Trying to keep the truth within bounds / and as the two-sectioned bus
makes / A wide turn forty cars follow” you realize you have just heard a critique
of the US economic system as written by one who lives in a flop house, has no money,
and who understands that 40 passengers in a two-sectioned bus can save the world
from the rapacious private ownershippers who follow the bus's wake. ...read
on
Village Voice (January 20-26, 1999)
Remember how the Beats traded the order of '50s America for the liberatory order
of Eastern religions? Koon Woon inverts and rethinks that trade: born in a small
village in 1949 China, he listens to the edge of America, pours Cantonese nouns into
a Stevens/Eliot/ Whitman mixmaster and serves up dispatches from a borderland where
expulsion is a state of grace.
...read on
Seattle Contemporary Review of
Asian American Literature (interview)
Koon Woon was born in a small village near Canton in 1949, immigrated to the United
States in 1960, and presently resides in Seattle's International District. He began
writing poetry when mental illness struck at the age of 30. He found himself homeless
twice as the result of mental illness. He maintains that "poetry was/is the
tenuous thread that held me together." ...read
on
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