With a Foreword by Gary Snyder, a personal essay by the poet, and contributions from the Hmong American Writers’ Circle, this open-hearted book is the gorgeous collection of a visionary Hmong poet whose radiant language and natural eloquence has offered us the dark and light of his soul. Moua’s poems sing that we will never satiate the sorrows of our dead and displaced, where grief, for the Hmong, knows no season. Here, we find ourselves nursed into strange health, contending always with decisions that may “dismember or consume” our people. It is a revelation that every person should read. Karst Mountains Will Bloom is a landmark achievement: ascendant, transcendent, visionary. This poet is a treasure and a light. What an important collection for Asian American literature.

Pos Moua lives in Merced, California, with his wife and five children.  He is a language arts teacher who has taught Hmong and English at Merced High School and Merced College for about twenty years. Karst Mountains Will Bloom (Blue Oak Press, 2019) is his first book giving an account of love and family and identity in the poet’s new land.  His poems have appeared in the anthologies Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing (New Rivers Press, 2000) and How Do I Begin?: A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Heyday Books, 2011).