Painting by Mark Dutcher
Cover design by Laura Joakimson
Percussing the Thinking Jar from Omnidawn, Fall 2024
Maw Shein Win
In Percussing the Thinking Jar, her third full-length poetry collection, Maw Shein Win reveals how a mind can log thoughts and observations. Through deft braiding of the pleasures, pains, and anxieties of living in a human body, Win has developed new forms which carry the reader to realms that are both deeply personal and universal. These poems are rendered with dreamlike imagery and surprising humor. This generous collection includes 16 Sumi ink drawings by artist Mark Dutcher. Interwoven through the poems, his drawings highlight juxtapositions and counterpoint rhythms inspired by the poems. Reflecting on our strange times, Percussing the Thinking Jar is a hypnotic book that invites readers into conversation with their own vulnerability and resilience.
Endorsements
Percussing the Thinking Jar is a marvel of lyric invention. The “thought logs”; make stream of consciousness feel new. Stroke log, vertigo log, anxiety meditations, wild ideas: no idea or language is out of Win’s reach. This is original, gorgeous, engrossing poetry.
—Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate
Lately I’ve been worrying about poetic style, which is a branched variation of the poet’s perpetual subject of worry, language. Maw Shein Win’s Percussing the Thinking Jar took me a step away from such worrying, weighted though the poems are with worry. Here are poems in which a love of the sounds and textures of words is manifestly a determining stylistic priority, poems that, consequently, are richly musical, and feature lines that expertly play their rhythms against each other-- “vesper flux, pressure switch // I close my eyes & tap the lid.” How beautifully the ampersand in the second, iambic tetrameter line both acknowledges--insofar as it is as much a symbol as a syllable--and supplies the unstressed syllable missing in the first, not-quite iambic tetrameter line! I’m grateful for that music, that style.
—Shane McCrae, author of Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of A Kidnapping
Percussing the Thinking Jar is a multisensory experience befitting Maw Shein Win, an artist who works and collaborates across disciplines and genres. An inventive collection of “logs” recorded over several years during and after lockdown, this book is a kind of Golden Record, snapshots of a restless roving mind trying to make sense of and connect to the world through personal and global cataclysms. Here, the mundane mingles with existential fears, medical procedures, contemporary art, apparitions of flora and fauna, and much more. Piercing reflections (‘I am blinking into another eye.’) are juxtaposed with luscious phrases (“Vata & the Vine, Pitta of the Mind, Kapha & its Kind”), forming a haunting dreamscape that indeed “astonish[es] with sonic delight.”
—Jenny Qi, author of Focal Point
Percussing the Thinking Jar is a breath of fresh air. A clarity. An order to the pandemonium of a global pandemic. Death becomes inescapable and each log constructs a life raft to navigate the uncertainty of being a body driven by its desire for aliveness. At any moment anything can happen, so why not let poetry happen? Why not fortify the isolated and aging body with “metaphor quarries”? With “hands [that] tremble quiet,” Maw Shein Win offers observations that defamiliarize and sensate narratives that bring new value to our “post-capitalist worth.” Percussing the Thinking Jar transforms human afflictions into a different organ for perception.
—Arisa White, author of Who’s Your Daddy?
In “Thought Log about Thought Logs,” the last poem in Maw Shein Win’s book, Percussing the Thinking Jar, the poet begins: “I started writing thought logs in spring 2020/Response to isolation, scatter, containment.” In her liminal poems, Win sensitively and precisely registers the pulse of living through the pandemic, alert to how daily life has changed, how magnified the smallest details have become, how “everything is phenomena,” and how nothing can “last forever.” Amidst the deaths and stillness, the nurse’s instructions, shopping for “peanut brittle online,” “mastering the art of doing nothing,” and listening to “roadrunners,” Win stays open to whatever the world throws at her, its gradations, shifts, and ruptures. This is a book to read and reread. It does something no other poetry book I have read does: it offers “diaphanous comfort” while we are at the “chaos party.”
—John Yau, author of Tell it Slant
Sumi ink drawings by Mark Dutcher