Thousand Star Hotel

Author: Bao Phi

Publisher: Coffee House Press (2017)

Winner of the 2017 Poetry Center Book Award

Thousand Star Hotel confronts the silence around racism, police brutality, and the invisibility of the Asian American urban poor.

“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 of the tongue is discovered’ that lets us know what ‘tastes like the middle of the crosshairs of a drone bomber / tastes like science concocting survival.’” 

–Tyehimba Jess