Thousand Star Hotel confronts the silence around racism, police brutality, and the invisibility of the Asian American urban poor. From with thanks to Sahra Nguyen for the "refugee style slogan": They give the kids candy to bet. My daughter loses the first four rounds, she's a quiet wire as they take her candy away, piece by piece. When she finally wins, I ask if she wants to play again. "No!" she shouts, grabbing her candy, "I want to go home!" True refugee style: take everything you got and run with it.
"The many fans of Bao Phi will be thrilled by this book. New readers will be seduced by his trademark blend of passion, politics, and poetry. His poems alternate between the profane and the provocative as they deal with war and history, love and heartbreak, the inner city and the inner self. A powerful read, a gutsy writer."
Viet Thanh Nguyen
"Bao Phi's Thousand Star Hotel is a vividly inward look at an Asian American experience that never flinches from the hard realizations of humanity. Bao ties generations together at his personal crossroad of fatherhood and lets the reader see, feel, and hear the electricity of his renowned stage performance blossoming on the page. Bao's poems haunt our collective American psyche until a new region
Tyehimba Jess, author of Olio
"Bao Phi's Thousand Star Hotel echoes the fire in his earlier work, which skewers racism and class with the precision of skilled chef. Yet, when Phi splits open the vulnerable and humbling moments of love, childhood, and fatherhood, he creates a body of satisfying, poignant poems that create moments of quiet introspection like diners hushed by the first bites of an anticipated meal. Bao Phi carrie
