Mike O’Connor

ISBN: 1-929355-18-1

Price: $15 (trade paperback) * 168 pages

“Mike O'Connor's When the Tiger Weeps is a fascinating rhizomic accomplishment, moving in simultaneous directions through history, myth, investigation, lyric (& Buddhist) imagination, towards a generous "whole" of experience and vision. Are things what they seem? This collection is a web of probing and penetrating particulars, riveting and beautiful.”

Anne Waldman

"The world owes the translators [of the Tienanmen Square poems] a debt for their felicitous rendition that brings to life . . . the dreams and nightmares of a nation in travail."

Wu Ninkun, author of A Single Tear

About this book:

When the Tiger Weeps is a far-ranging journey—with autobiographical roots—through disparate cultures; a history beginning in the West with the American Civil War and culminating in the wisdom-sage tradition of the Far East. Along the way—in poetry, prose, and translations—the work dramatizes individual and collective responses to oppression—war, tyranny and social injustice—and the triumphs and tragedies of those responses. Looking from a distance at the world of humankind, even the tiger grows compassionate; even the tiger weeps. The book includes sections on Tienanmen Square, on General Grant in the Civil War, on Ishi (the last American Indian), on a logging truck driver who catapults down a mountain with no brakes, and on a young boy from Taiwan who sees a ghost.

About the author:

Mike O’Connor is a poet and a translator of Chinese literature. A native son of the Olympic Peninsula, Washington State, he spent more than a decade farming in the Dungeness-Sequim River Valley and cedar logging and tree-planting in the Olympic Mountains. From 1979 until 1995, he lived mostly in the Republic of China, Taiwan, studying Chinese language and culture while working as a journalist. A MFA graduate of the Jack Kerouac School, Naropa University, and a recipient of a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he currently resides with his wife Liu Ling-hui, a dance teacher and choreographer, in Port Townsend, Washington. When the Tiger Weeps is his eighth book.