Sacramento Poetry Center Presents Burlee Vang

A beautiful and powerful collection! Every piece is painstakingly crafted with its own daring sword, cutting through the heart's sorrow. Here, poetry is liberation, and Burlee Vang is thus far our best Hmong writer!" — Pos Moua

Burlee Vang is the winner of the 2010 Swan Scythe Press Chapbook Contest (Sacramento).

His contest-winning book is The Dead I Know: Incantation for Rebirth. The book can be purchased from the Swan Scythe Press website -- www.swanscythe.com -- through PayPal, and is also available at Amazon Books.

Burlee Vang's prose and poetry have appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, and many other literary journals. His work has also been anthologized in Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers: Best New Voices of 2006 (Random House) and Highway 99: A Literary Journey Through California’s Great Central Valley (Heyday Books). He holds an MFA in fiction from California State University – Fresno.

As the founder of The Hmong American Writers' Circle, he conducts workshops to promote creative writing within the Hmong community of Fresno, where he lives with his wife, Mary, and their two children, Belle and Jude.

Mr. Vang’s book was chosen from among more than 130 submitted manuscripts from more than 20 U.S. states and and from other countries.

Praise for Vang's work:

"Burlee Vang is part of everything and everybody he writes about, from growling stomachs to the tiger’s roar. This is a persuasive debut."
— Sandra McPherson

"These poems articulate the harsh world of a war-torn country and its human aftermath as powerfully as any I’ve ever read. The various and distinct voices flinch at nothing, and yet somehow the book is not despairing. This is a visceral book, full of passion and fire, and something like hopefulness starts to rise from the ruins here—not as a gesture or a poetic device—but as an honest human response. This is a beautiful, harrowing and necessary book, and Burlee Vang is an extraordinary new voice in American poetry." — Corrinne Clegg Hales

After Our Honeymoon in Laos

My husband says he can’t
sleep. Says he’s turned into a tiger.
It’s just jet lag, I whisper,
rubbing his back. He groans:
The jungle is calling my name,
The mountains, rivers, villages.
You need sleeping pills, I tell him,
rummaging through our cabinets.
But I’ve grown restless, too,
now that he’s stopped
shaving. Now that he’s begun
to eye the fat pigeons on our window
ledge. When I lock up the house
& come to bed, he’s already there—
waiting—glaring at me
like a tropic moon.

— Burlee Vang