"The Burden of Being Burmese displays an extraordinary fertile and febrile imagination—one that will both delight and disturb American readers."—Marjorie Perloff

"A brilliantly off-kilter book."—John Ashbery

Ko Ko Thett writes that he is "a poet by choice and a Burmese by chance." The poems in this collection—the first major volume in English by a contemporary Burmese poet—range from "faddish sugar crystals," written in Burmese for his 1996 illegal campus chapbook in Yangon, to his autumn 2014 "anxiety attack" in the Netherlands, where he now lives. Thett is the co-editor and translator of the seminal volume Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets.