Invisible Gifts

by Maw Shein Win

In her first full-length collection of poems, Win depicts a colorful world imbued with unexpected paradoxes: nature is both comforting and savagely unnerving; love is permanent and fleeting; the accuracy and flaws of memory abound. Her experiences with illness and recovery intertwine with her identity as a Burmese American daughter of immigrant doctors, flowing in poems like “Hands”: My father’s hands, frail birds, shaking wings. / In Burmese, “win” means bright. / Hands that stitched skin together and brought back life. Win’s unique perspective and artful language offer readers insight into how the heart can bend and mend without breaking.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2018

Reviews

[Laura Joakimson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Are you in the room with me now?


"I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone," wrote Ranier Maria Rilke. Maw Shein Win is a poet who knows secret things and her book is alive with psychic movement and bright, fascinating imagery from many different places.

The poem that moved me most was "Are you in the room with me now?" a conversation with a therapist about struggling to cry.

Cinema grounds many poems. And a sense of playfulness. "Look into my yellow eyes with love." This is a book to come back to and find new humor and loveliness. "if you encounter an artist at close range:/remain calm/pick up small children immediately/stand upright/maintain eye contact/back away slowly."

A book to read, reread & cherish.

"look through the keyhole: the star-blood flowers."

"Why she was let out of her cage she'll never know."

"All I know is that I fell. And it felt it felt it felt it felt."

[Pam S · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an avid reader, I’ve always been somewhat promiscuous when it comes to prose, but I am much pickier when it comes to poetry. I’ll try anything once, maybe twice; but it takes something special to earn a permanent place on my already crowded shelves. Maw Shein Win’s Invisible Gifts is a stunningly diverse collection of various styles, from narrative to free verse, along with some that seem uniquely her own. Win has an uncanny ability to take certain, specific events and tie them to more universal themes; deftly turning the ordinary into the extraordinary with careful use of language in a worldly yet humble way. She describes such seemingly disparate things as fruit, flowers, and feelings with equal reverence, showing the reader how interconnected all things really are; her words like gossamer threads that connect time and place to the larger entity of shared experience. In Win’s poems, the external, natural world mirrors the internal, emotional one in ways that are both stunningly simple and remarkably complex. The effortless elegance of a bowl of oranges shares a table with sharp childhood memories seated beside more grown up experiences, and we can see introspection take shape in the author’s mind as she writes her way through love, loss, and life. Throughout it all, Win periodically stops to marvel at the universes contained within the palm of her hand, inviting us to wonder with her. Her voice here is like that of a time traveler, moving through this universe of worlds; a universe of words. It feels like a privilege to be given a ticket to the journey.

[judy-b. judy-b. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maw Shein Win whispers these poems in your ear; they start softly, then land with a firm power in the belly. Sit with them and reread them and digest them over a day or two, for they contain the unseen presents (&presence too) of the title.

[Lael Gold · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pleasingly sensual and unabashedly surreal, Maw Shein Win’s consistently vivid sense of the concrete side of life, paradoxically, conveys the intangible. One particularly powerful example of this is “Are You In the Room with Me Now?” A brilliantly sidelong meditation on trauma, it evokes the vulnerabilities and uncertainties of healing in a way that both stuns the reader and fills them with feeling.

It is fitting that Win has arranged her poems chromatically; throughout, her language has the same vibrancy as the most lively hues. I highly recommend purchasing and savoring this volume. To give just an inkling of the delights and sensations that await you if you do, I leave you with the subtitles that organize the book: Blue Bells, Pink Light, Silvery Moth, The Greenhouse. Need I say more?

[Steve Gilmartin · Rating 5 out of 5]

With Invisible Gifts, Maw Shein Win in her low-key way takes us on a wild ride. Each new poem is like encountering “That utopian moment / when the film begins / and the sound spins / awash in honey and wine.” Most of these poems don’t inhabit lyric poetry’s conventional “I” but rather become the eye of a free-floating consciousness that doesn’t miss a thing. Influenced in part by French New Wave cinema techniques—jump cuts, wry elliptical narratives, and sudden changes in scale and perspective—and a kind of Felliniesque detached celebration of strangeness, these poems have artfully embedded themselves in a world of sensuous detail in which everything has a story but where meaning is up for grabs. In the world of this book, where “a diamond is a tunnel” and “a mansion is a savage gown,” nothing is fixed, everything transforms into something else or else embodies multiple identities. But with all its surrealistic tropes of flux and instability, the voice throughout is calm, centered and, in many poems, elegaic. One of the most remarkable qualities of Invisible Gifts is how it is both aesthetically adventurous and, in its understatedness, emotionally powerful; the I/eye here has a heightened awareness of the present in all its complexity and yet feels and pays homage to absence and loss, the transience of people and of the natural world.

[Yvonne Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Maw Shein Win’s latest poetry collection, Invisible Gifts published by Manic D Press, is like an express trip around the world and out to the universe without leaving one’s room, without even putting shoes on or packing a kip. And if fact yes, keep the shoes off, and stretch out under an oak or bay laurel tree and get your head around such delightful turns of phrases, for example, from The Dressing Stick, “She peeled the scar back and underneath found a child,” which suggests a murder thriller or expose of diagnosed cancer or worse but such morbid projections get whisked away with a “dressing stick with a twinkling star on the head” and morph into another story, another time and another dimension. Maw Shein Win maneuvers her reader through narratives of divorce, surgeries, a challenging childhood and death itself with deft navigational twists and turns that defeat logical convention but instead provide a dream journey through images, “A mansion is a savage gown,” that startle the eye while confronting the grey matter and sending the reader on a trajectory of their own. There is much to be found here, and like a long-planned voyage it offers an abundance to feast upon.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

Across all four sections, there were many glimmering moments when Win crafted evocative lines that made you feel as though you were experiencing her thoughts and memories, the paradoxes found in one’s universe, as well as her struggles with illness. These poems flow somewhat irregularly, but in a way, I think it works for this collection. I wasn’t particularly drawn to the collection as a whole (nothing especially amazing, in my opinion), but, like many collections, there were some beautiful and heartfelt poems.

Some favorites: “The Contract,” “The Misfortunes of Guan Yin,” “Are You in the Room with Me Now?,” “Spine,” “Polychromatic Scenes,” “Questions for the Silvery Moth,” and “Flower Instructions”

Read for the Sealey Challenge.

[Susie · Rating 5 out of 5]

For Maw Shein Win, language is a door to another world. "The sun is a cymbal," she writes. "A cat is a bear." And somehow, we believe these impossibilities. Invisible Gifts is accomplished, tight, energetic, and well-curated, which is to say, everything that is on the page belongs on the page. Win's poems evoke the natural world and the urban world, America and Asia, the intimacy of family and the expansiveness of society. There is a generosity and a humor here in this impressive and infinitely readable first collection.

[MSJLibrary]

In this first poetry collection by Burmese American writer Maw Shein Win, the author details her experiences with illness and recovery, as well as how her cultural identity intertwined with these processes. With colorful and artful language, Win gives conclusive proof that the human heart is capable of bending and mending without breaking.

[EL]

impressions
- some truths
- ignitive wordplay
- movies
- polychromatic colors

marked
- softer animals
- you will be with me in a town called paradise
- the contract “he has not read the rules”
- kick the can
- falling
- film #3
- questions for the silvery moth “sunny side up”
- invisible gifts
- oars

[Laura Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems read like lyrical indexes or inventories where places and objects and colors and images resonate with loss and love and memory.

[Shelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Especially enjoyed the nature poems.

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

A keeper to be read again and again. Looking through a mesh of evocative lines, the way one looks at an abstract painting, I find a world tinted with tender greens, one hung with memory, its longing and loss, a fragile world of “lime and lemon liquors swiped from our parents’ cabinets” (in “Limes”), or “A green glass bowl of rice sliding to the floor bits of glass mixed with / rice and shrimp” (in “Mothers”).

One of my several favorites is ‘The Misfortunes of Guan Yin,” an identification with the compassionate goddess’s suffering. She has survived the “brackish waters,” transformed in “the evolution of an irritant,” become “a girl dancing in the garden of her mind.” I discover more insights every time I read this “mother-of-pearl.”

Shein Win’s poems are a way into the world beyond, one into which her sister for whom this entire volume is an elegy has already gone, leaving us, as suggested in the very poignant penultimate poem “Almond Trees Uprooted,” like the trees “still breathing”:

benched stars, blanched dusk
sweet and bitter things bracing
for unknown terrains