Is a door

"Including poetry projects, a chapbook and incidental poems previously published in magazines and by small presses, is a door makes use of the poem's ability for "suddenness" to subvert closure: the sudden question, the sudden turn, the sudden opening - writing that is generated from linguistic mindfulness, improvisation, compositional problem-solving, collaborative events, travel, investigation and documentary - in short, poetry as practice." "Part one, "Isadora Blue," is grounded in the author's encounter with the smashed and broken doors along the hurricane-devastated waterfront of Telchac Puerto, a small village on the north coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. It resonates throughout the other three sections of the book, with its attention to hybridity and "betweenness"--A poetic investigation of racialized otherness - and the composition of "citizen" and "foreigner" through history and language." "Part two of this series of poems, "Ethnogy Journal," written during a trip to Thailand and Laos in 1999, hinges around aspects of "tourist" and "native." Here the poems play in the interstices of spectacle, food and social sightseeing." "Much of this poetry is framed by Wah's acute sense