Poetry

104

Is 911 an emergency phone number?
Is 911 a symbol for terrorist attacks?
911 is 9+1+1= 11, which marks 11 years of living in the United States of America for Anhthao Bui, a Vietnamese American woman. Anhthao is the author of Yellow Flower, a poetry collection marking her 11- year, long-distance marathon toward production of her own literature. With almost 60 poems, Yellow Flower reveals Anhthao's secret life of inner struggles and conflicts—love, patriotism, anger, regret, and self-doubt. Although pain and sorrow are the major themes, some positive poems are full of hope and appreciation toward the United States and its people.

Yellow Flower is the book for those who are seeking to read emotional poetry.

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Customers’ review

Bridging Cultures
Roland Cheek, A reviewer, 04/24/2008
YELLOW FLOWER is an honest, evocative, sincere effort at bridging cultural gaps by a Vietnamese immigrant to America. It can be recommended not alone as a memoir of the author's own struggle to cross that chasm, but as an educational tool for a reader to comprehend our own ancestors' struggles to merge into new and different societies.

Let This Yellow Flower Grow
A reviewer, A reviewer, 04/19/2008
I thoroughly enjoyed Anhthao Bui's Yellow Flower. Her poems convey a rich array of imagery that blends the experience of someone raised in one culture, and now surviving in another. It is interesting how Anhthao is able to create a visual picture from the thought and speech patterns of the Vietnamese culture, and yet have it translate so well to the 'Western Mind.' I applaud Miss Bui for her passion and keen observations.

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YELLOW FLOWER'S FOREWORD

Anhthao Bui cautiously entered my classroom of Steinbeck students, English 167. She had launched into an English major at San Jose State, a typically determined move by this Vietnamese immigrant, a woman with a mission. “I fell down the first time I was assigned to the English War/Considering I was an ordinary hero without armor,” she writes in a poem about her confrontations with language. Indeed, for anyone who knows Anhthao, her struggles to master and teach the English language have had the classical dignity of this poem that describes her assault. But Anhthao rearmed herself again and again, earning a degree, finding a job. She wrote for her classes, and she wrote for herself:

Collecting last breaths
Growing in obscurity
Conquering the ruin

A yellow flower
Emerges in a deep jungle
Radiates the world

Like that flower—and the title of this collection—Anhthao radiantly emerges here as a poet of great promise. This collection is characterized by the honesty which is always hers, “My poetry is written in/Tears and blood.” As she traces her passions and admits her loneliness or sense of failure, she reveals, if briefly, her interior landscapes. And the poems change moods frequently, as she ranges over a broad poetic field: love, death, university libraries, family, job, America. What is revealed in these poems is an immigrant’s appreciation of this complex country: the dream seems more tangible when a newcomer embraces it, and American leaders more profound when seen through her eyes. Poignantly, her poems bear the stamp of her reading as an English major, both in epigraphs and in this, one of the loveliest in the collection, a Whitmanesque reflection.

NATURE

A pair of white breasts
A pair of black breasts
A pair of small breasts
A pair of big breasts
A pair of short breasts
A pair of long breasts
A pair of firm breasts
A pair of wrinkled breasts
Bathe in the same spring
Blocked by many rocks
And green trees
What kind of women are they?
They are not shameful
When men see their naked bodies
They do not fear danger
In a deep jungle

Anhthao’s poems bear the deep stamp of her gratitude and boundless generosity of spirit.

Shillinglaw Susan, Professor
Department of English and Comparative Literature
San Jose State University