Tien Mai, the poet-narrator of Daniel Samoilovich's book-length sequence, Awaking Demons, is a self-exiled Vietnamese princeling grumpily eking out a hotel life in 1930s Switzerland. 'Here/ where even the butterflies are different' is a source of amusement and amazement to him as he details the behaviour of the hotel servants and the other guests, and the strange local customs. But more often his mind turns to the woman he has left behind: 'The distance...
Related Subjects
Poetry