Picking off new shoots will not stop the spring: witness poems and essays from Burma/Myanmar 1988–2021

“WARNING: There’s blood everywhere in these pages. That’s as it should be. The book in your hands bears witness to the long, bloodstained struggle against military oppression by the people of Myanmar/Burma. Here is an anthology exceptional in impact and importance, not least because the poets and writers serving as witnesses have themselves fought and died at the frontlines of resistance.

‘Picking off new shoots will not stop the spring’ brings together for the first time in print⁠, in translations both inspired and felicitous, poet-heros of the ‘88 Uprising, new voices from within the Chin, Kachin and Rohingya minorities, young poet-warriors of the ongoing armed struggle, and early martyrs of the Spring Revolution, notably K Za Win and Khet Thi. Together they raise a cri de coeur of resistance, resilience, and⁠, through their poetry⁠, redemption.”
—Wendy Law-Yone, Author of Golden Parasol, A Daughter’s Memoir of Burma, The Road to Wanting, Irrawaddy Tango and The Coffin Tree

“From the Yoma foothills to the Chindwin river, Monywa to Cox’s Bazaar, the voices in this searing new collections map a rich wilderness of witness. Kachin, Nepal, Burmese, Rohingya, Shan, Sino-Burmese and other voices mourn the murdered, the disappeared, and light a pyre for a vanished future. Spanning more than forty years of resistance since the iconic student protests of 8 August 1988 to the nationwide protests and murderous mayhem that followed the military coup of February 2021, these writings offer more than witness. Through lullabies, battle-cries, memes, digital memorials, kitchen cacophonies, protective prayers, odes to flip flops, roadside burials and prison cells, they redefine poetic justice. An elegy to democracy, an artists’ manifesto and a rejection of the moral bankruptcy of a corrupt military, Ko Ko Thett and Brian Haman’s urgent new anthology demands our attention.”
—Penny Edwards, Associate Professor, Southeast Asian Studies (UC Berkeley)

“With poems and essays ranging from optimistic zeal to righteous rage, Myanmar’s writers have responded to the death and destruction wrought by the 2021 coup with prose imbued with birth, rebirth, and revolution. The powerful voices in this inspiring anthology demands that we all keep fighting for a free and just Myanmar, and reminds us that ‘If we retreat this time, we will have to live in defeat forever’.”
—Aye Min Thant, Features editor, Frontier Myanmar

Ko Ko Thett is a Burma-born poet, literary translator, and poetry editor for Mekong Review. He started writing poems for samizdat pamphlets at the Yangon Institute of Technology in the ‘90s. After a brush with the authorities in the 1996 student protest, and a brief detention, he left Burma in 1997 and has led an itinerant life ever since. Thett has published and edited several collections of poetry and translations in both Burmese and English. His poems are widely translated and anthologised. His translation work has been recognised with an English PEN award. Thett’s most recent poetry collection is Bamboophobia (Zephyr Press, 2022). He lives in Norwich, UK.

Brian Haman is a researcher and lecturer in the department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna. He completed his PhD in literature at the University of Warwick (UK) and has studied or held research appointments in Europe, China, and the US. A book, art, and music critic, he writes widely on contemporary culture from Asia, and, since 2017, has been an editor of The Shanghai Literary Review. His forthcoming books include an anthology of contemporary Chinese-language poetry in translation as well as an edition of the unpublished works of exiled Austrian Jewish writer Mark Siegelberg.