Bone Confetti by Muriel Leung
Poetry. Asian American Studies. In BONE CONFETTI, there are two types of survivors at the end of the world—lovers and ghosts who die, are revived, and die again. Each death and resurrection carves its way into the landscape of a wrecked city where skies are flocked by molten birds and trees grow in shades of ash. The same confetti floats between funeral and parade, wedding and hell. When all that is left is the terrible residue of memory, lovers and ghosts try their best to make do. They scale the horizon, collecting debris wherever they go in the attempt to fashion a new sense of humanity.
"BONE CONFETTI houses something else: an activity of mourning. The book does this in place of the other things it could have done. Or housed. It struck the bone of my own heart. It made the words into a bell. And the bell made me stop what I was doing, just as certain events or thoughts or scenes do, and orient to that unexpected, powerful sound. book could be, could feel like, to read. I am grateful for the chance to encounter her work at this time, in this part of the real year."—Bhanu Kapil