Winner, Josephine Miles Award from PEN Oakland Finalist, Norma Farber First Book Award Poetry Society of America October 1998 Poetry 6x7 in, 112 pp Paperback 1-885030-25-8 $8.95 list The Truth in Rented Rooms Poetry by Koon Woon Foreword by Russell Leong Book Description . About the Author . Excerpt . Reviews . Events . Buy Books Now Typed out in cramped tenement rooms or scrawled on bits of paper, Koon Woon's impulsive, startling poetry, collected for the first time in The Truth in Rented Rooms , probes the lonely world of itinerants and the dispossessed that is found in the shadows of immigrant life in the United States. His beat is one of narrow Chinatown alleyways and Greek diners, damp hotel rooms and emptying city parks. It is also a place of chance encounters and lingering epiphanies, pieced together through ruminations on Eastern and Western philosophical traditions, love and modal logic, present and past. Ranging in style from classical lyricism to syllabic construction to street shouting, Woon's poetry travels literally and figuratively beyond the constrained and finite world of the tenement poverty that is his subject to places distant - pre-Mao China, steel towns, a pastoral childhood. Woon's poetry - penetrating yet playful, and attuned to the breaks and charges of his own economic displacement and mental illness - attest to the regenerating eddies and convergences at the heart of a fully realized imagination. Woon's poetry taps into ideas that inspired the beat writers of the fifties and sixties: anti-establishment, anti-materialistic convictions; non-Western philosophical traditions; vernacular expression and democratic form. But while the beats were in a position to pick and choose from the cultural movements they admired - Buddhism, jazz, native rights - Woon writes from his own experience of cultural displacement. His poetry both describes and is in part derived from a predicament common to many immigrant men who came to a foreign, often hostile land only to find themselves living out their old age in bachelor-dominated tenements and urban ghettos. Woon's immigrant experiences allow him to encompass both the wisdom of rural Canton, piped into his life through letters from his aging uncle, and the existential clarity of his own loneliness. As such, his poems run counter to easily romanticized notions of rebellion - which is how beat culture is often mythologized and mainstreamed into today's marketplace - as much as they stand up to a starched-shirt establishmentarian ethos. Far from a blithe invitation to drop out, his poetry is both the gesture towards and the proof of a reengagement with the often contradictory impulses of a political, social, and cultural imagination. Praise for The Truth in Rented Rooms "Luckily it's the world. Miraculously, Koon Woon is alive in it, reminding us joyful and brilliant, sad as salt, untranslatable - live! Li Po in modern drag, the voice of New America, samo scrabbling to pay rent - Your father is buried in the same cemetery as Bruce Lee, you karate chop Whitman's block of wood, eat egg tarts to feel Chinese and buy a Japanese automatic rice cooker - perfect every time! The tradition of the wanderer is just a moment forever in the world's longest alley, under the table, the bubblegum kiss of the Tang dynasty - what a mess! Luckily, it's the world. Miraculously, Koon Woon has written The Truth. You read it!" - Bob Holman, Author, In With the Out Crowd (Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records) "Koon Woon, like Bob Kaufman, is a writer of solitudes. But like Walt Whitman, his solitudes contain multitudes. Join Koon Woon in his imaginings and enter into his room." - Steve Cannon, Director, A Gathering of the Tribes "In these poems I hear Koon Woon singing from his 'crib' - a unique kind of blues that reverberates all the way from little village Canton to the homeless alleys of Seattle, lyrics seasoned from the barbed indifference of the streets and his love of soy-stained bottleneck guitar. These bent notes float out of his window, twist and ring out into the cold crisp air of a gray winter sky. 'When the cooks go home in nights like bits/ of shrimp in bitter-melon soup.' Drink it down, drink it down. The soup of this poet produces a bitter but satisfying warmth that needs to be experienced." - Alan Chong Lau, Author, Songs for Jadina Editor, Pacific Reader/International Examiner "These poems set a thousand horses galloping in the Asian diaspora in which so many are caught." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti "It was not until I began to study the poetry of Koon Woon that my preconceptions, like old walls, tumbled down, and my eyelids, like closed curtains, fluttered open." - Russell Leong, from the foreword