Longlisted for the PEN America 2021 Open Book Award, a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, and shortlisted for The Golden Poppy Awards 2021


Storage Unit for the Spirit House from Omnidawn

Maw Shein Win

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With sharp focus and startling language, the poems in Maw Shein Win's second full-length book, Storage Unit for the Spirit House use 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, as forgotten children sleep under Mylar blankets and daughters try to see through the haze of a father's cigarette smoke. The artful assemblages of both earthly and noncorporeal possessions throughout the collection become resonant and alive, and Win must summon "a circle of drums and copper bells" to appease the nats who have moved into a long-ago family house. This carefully curated collection of unlikely objects and images creates an act of ritual that uses language to interrogate how pain can transform into a nat or a siren. The minimal line length belies maximal imagination in this remarkable new book.

Northern California Book Reviewers:

Maw Shein Win, a Burmese-American poet, has channeled her South Asian ancestry to produce this strange, rich, wondrous book. It's primed with an epigraph by a South Asian scholar explaining that nats are spirits holding power over particular localities, which often build small shrines called spirit houses for offerings to their local nat, that must be placated to avoid injury or disaster. Nats begin and end the book and flit mischievously throughout. Early on, in "Storage Unit 202," comes a list of five items, the last of which is "directions to the otherworld," providing a supernal tingle to the rest, although 'other worlds' are never referred to again. Indeed, this is a totally unpredictable, continuously surprising book of poems, which is comprised of abbreviated voices, often disembodied, occasionally in the first person, for instance, "Hospital" begins, "tinctures for pain, capsized vessels / hand reaches into warm body / she believes in magic & so do I / painted things," though there's no way to know if "I" there actually refers to the poet. The voices, then, say the book, surreal, often, and richly languaged. Storage Unit for the Spirit World is a book to be savored, ridden like a spiritual roller coaster for surprise and poetic thrills.

Noah Sanders in print edition of The San Franciscan Magazine:

Maw Shein Win’s most recent collection of poetry is a study of containers–storage units, our bodies, prisons, photographs–ungainly, sometimes organic boxes in which we store our lives, past and present. In language that often approaches stream-of-consciousness, Win opens the boxes of her own life and lets us peek at the objects arranged within: “miniature show dogs”, “meat-eating flowers lightning rods”, “two ferns, the missing sisters”. There is a sparse, cinematic feel to Win’s poetry, as if we are seeing single frames in the film of her life. Within these frames, Win’s descriptions of thingsact as emotional mise-en-scene. A collection of items arranged on the page suggests the outline of a specific moment, with just enough gorgeously crafted detail to nestle into. In her poem “Containers,” the author writes, “I witness each body through the missing bricks.” Storage Unit for the Spirit Houseoffers readers a similar opportunity–to view Win’s memories through the space between the details. Maw Shein Win lives in El Cerrito.

 

For more poetry read by Maw Shein Win, scroll to the bottom of the page.

Endorsements

In this highly lyrical and surrealist book, Maw Shein Win creates an archival repository of the poet’s daily life and a litany of subconscious images mapped like a wreckage of memories devoid of time or place. Win achieves the poet’s singular most important role: to distill language to its essential characteristics. We encounter only the objects and their weight, only what is necessary to remain in our imaginations for years to come. And remain they will as a testament to this book’s triumph. Win uses the theater of the absurd to break out of the imprisonment of mimetic representation and we are left picking up the pieces on the floor, on the walls, and in the sink to create something new. Win wields an incredible talent to take inspiration from every associative function of an object and, in a Cubist manner, present it from all angles at once, at all times at once. I came away from this book feeling an urgent need to “hold on now to what’s left,” to keep it in a box. There is safety in the tangibility of these images that we take for granted in our daily lives. We find comfort in their weight in our palms, and in a world where not too much seems safe, or coherent, or true, or even real, Win implores us to take refuge in the undeniable beauty of all we can hold in our hands.  

--Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, author of Cenzóntle and Children of the Land


These spare poems are haunted. With a blown-up heart, Maw Shein Win writes about possessions and flashes that hark back like ghosts to our before’s. In Storage Unit for the Spirit House prisons, tombs, portals, bottles, storage units are memorials. I would call these poems luminous and gorgeously darkly-edged, bellowing as they do with the knowledge that we never truly depart from all of our departed things. 

--Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree


In a world madly clamoring over borders and quarantining cultures, Maw Shein Win’s bold new collection blurs the line between commonplace and out of place. Taking a Burmese Spirit House and its itinerant occupants, as its compass, these diaphanous poems lead you through abandoned nightclubs and family chests, medicine cabinets and record sleeves, Buddhist reliquaries and burning forests, prison cells and guitar chambers. Some slam you like a tequila shot, others urge you to linger. In their intimate echo-work and vivid imagery, each of these fearless poems work like quicksilver on the all pervasive imagery of deep state and global capital, subverting the panopticon and making us the eye at the center of our worlds. Taken in quiet sips or drunk in one, the Storage Unit for the Spirit House invites us to reconsider and reconstitute, the holding patterns that organize our lives, and reminds us of the power of the spirit – animal, human or Nat - to resist containment.   

--Penny Edwards, Associate Professor, Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley 

 

This book is a gem. Maw Shein Win's compact lines have the power of haiku. She is mistress of the acute, quietly searing detail, of precisely calibrated shifts between the vast and the tiny, of haunting flashes of overlapping worlds, and of her own lyrical-telegraphic style. Constructed from shards of what can only be remembered or recounted in fragments, these poems are startling stream-of-consciousness mosaics in which childhood is "a burning kingdom," the moon is a "lucent coin" and the future might be a "birthmark on forehead in the shape of a flame."

--Amy Gerstler, author of Scattered at Sea

 

Memories of the extraordinary and quotidian are often stowed in a collective cabinet of curiosities without much afterthought in our modern world, never mind a careful inventory of all that has been and all that could be. In Maw Shein Win’s second poetry collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House, the poet’s sublime, unerring eye traverses vast emotional and corporeal terrains of childhood, family, culture, illness, history, longing, and the unseen realms in exquisite, intimate detail while contending with what we deem sacred. Objects and sentiments are meticulously observed with relish and awe like a prism held up to the light. Each poem is an offering, a rosary bead in a chain of meditations, odes, elegies, mantras––a reflective trance that fashions a world within a world full of wonder, whimsy, a bit of mischief, painstaking beauty, and endless grace.

--Su Hwang, author of BODEGA


Maw Shein Win has no weaknesses nor restraints in this collection that might map how thought and memory were meant to exist. Poems that sharpen the soul. Cosmic architecture made from and into the simple organs of small places. And while an afterworld owes her for its articulation, she won’t kick the ghosts while they are down. 

--Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of Heaven is All Goodbyes

 

Poetry has long been a vessel, a container of history, emotion, perceptions, keepsakes. This piercing, gorgeous collection stands both inside and outside of containment: the porcelain vase of stargazer lilies is considered alongside the galley convicts, the children sleeping on the cement floors of detention cells, the nats inside their spirit houses; the spirit houses inside their storage units. 'The soft part of the brain fits into a clear jar.' One observes, in these nestings and inclusions, dioramas and offices, the human eye peering out and peering in: 'I witness each body through the missing bricks.' These poems are portals to other worlds and to our own, a space in which one sees and one is seen. A marvelous, timely and resilient book.

--D.A. Powell, author of Repast: Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails


In Maw Shein Win’s second poetry collection, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, we enter various portals, from Burma to California (and beyond), emerging in pieces with “directions to the otherworld.” Each poem is a small offering, a look at certain illnesses and violence within family, including land and the bodies they occupy. To honor these spaces, Win writes “we wore bright colors to disorient the animals.” These poems are crafted with such precision that these travels teach us how “to mark the now” even when we feel trapped by sunsets, cinemas, or reliquaries. This is a beautiful book.

--Khaty Xiong, author of Poor Anima


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