YELLOW FLOWER by Anhthao Bui

YELLOW FLOWER

Author: Anhthao Bui
Paperback: 104 pages
Publisher: AuthorHouse (July 12, 2007)
Language: English
6x9 softcover
ISBN-10: 143432297
ISBN-13: 978-1-4343-2279-1
Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.3 inches
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Yellow Flower is a poetry collection marking her 11- year marathon toward the publications of her own literature. With almost 60 poems, Yellow Flower reveals Bui’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.
Anhthao wishes to dedicate Yellow Flower to the celebration marking San Jose State University's 150th anniversary.
ANHTHAO BUI
Anhthao Bui had lived in Saigon, Vietnam before she migrated to San Jose, California in late 1996. She started learning English as a Second Language at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose in the fall of 1997. She transferred to San Jose State University in the fall of 2000, and graduated in May 2004. Anhthao Bui earned her bachelor of arts in English.
Ms. Bui's background is multicultural and includes education in French, Vietnamese, Buddhism, Catholicism, Confucianism, Communism, and Western Civilization.
Anhthao Bui continued her education at National University in San Jose in June 2005, but soon discontinued her pursuits for her personal reason.

INTRODUCTION

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.

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