Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Poetry

ANGEL & HANNAH

Ishle Park

A Novel in Verse

A novel written in verse (and performed as part of the Hip Hop Theater Festival). Set against backdrop of Queens, NYC in 1993, comes a contemporary love story - a reimagining of Romeo and Juliet, featuring a Korean girl from Queens and a Puerto Rican boy from Brooklyn.

Written with a hip-hop cadence, ANGEL & HANNAH brilliantly captures the passion and pulse of the city's neighborhoods in which Angel, a free spirit from a troubled family, and Hannah, who comes from a strict Korean immigrant home, reside. When Hannah leaves home, against her parents' wishes, to build a life with Angel, they soon realize that life together is more complicated than they imagined, and their cultural divide is too wide.

Ishle Park delivers dynamic, engrossing writing style - poems and sonnets that describe the real-life struggles and sacrifices of love, addiction, street life, and poverty, a remarkable work that can be read aloud or savored alone.

Ishle Park is the first woman to become Poet Laureate of Queens. Her debut, THE TEMPERATURE OF THIS WATER, was awarded the Pen America Beyond Margins Award, and the Member's Choice Award from AAWW. An award-winning poet, singer, hula dancer, surfer, certified yoga teacher, lomi lomi practitioner, and mother, she's traveled the world reading and performing at universities and writing festivals. Park has organized benefits and shared the stage with other activists like Sonia Sanchez and Angela Davis. She is of Korean ancestry and both her daughters were born and are now being raised on the Hawai'ian islands.

Available products
Book Published 2021-05-11 by One World

Comments

Ishle Yi Park speaks to us from the most tender, furious, and emotionally raw space in her breathtaking novel-in-verse. Angel & Hannah makes love feel revolutionary and desire feel like embattled truth. Reading it, I was often breathless, believing in the brilliance that is the bruised wonder of youth. Park brings us as close to a heart's fire as we are willing to go and leaves us soaring over the possibility of a new dream.

A passionate novel in verse about the love between two New York City teenagers whose cultural and economic expectations eventually turn their relationship to dust... The book's poems are tied together in four sections named for the seasons, beginning with spring, when the flowers of all beginnings bud... The richest parts of the book are the tantalizing glimpses of Hannah's culture - often seen through Hannah's thoughts of her mother and the Korean comfort food she would cook - and her yearning to not become her parents... A tender and honest story of young love striving to survive the streets.

I love the way that verse and form offer a type of restraint, inside of which the imagination of both writer and reader can flourish. Ishle Yi Park does a stunning job of using stunning bursts of language and imagery to reconceptualize and reframe a familiar narrative. I loved sinking into the world of this book. I could feel the seasons changing.

Angel and Hannah is triumphant. Ishle Yi Park's narrative sequence of sonnets is sensuous, tender and faceted like cut glass. I feel protective of Angel and Hannah. I want their love to flourish like an empress tree growing in an abandoned lot in Queens. These erotic, fresh and absolutely necessary poems of a cross-racial romance need to be trumpeted from the rooftops, overtaking the canonized Romeos and Juliets and Heathcliffs and Catherines. I love this book.

Angel & Hannah is a gorgeously written, unforgettable, sweet and wild love story. In the heart of Queens and Brooklyn, we feel the electricity of a first love, race and culture, desire and trouble, as the young lovers come alive, "stunned in sweetness." Park writes, "Why are they in love, you ask? Why does water love sky? Moon chase sun? Light reflect light?" The brilliant, cinematic verse and boundless heart let us breathe in the music of Angel and Hannah's grace and grief. I love and recommend this book with my whole heart.

Poet Park (The Temperature of This Water) reimagines Romeo & Juliet in her wrenching debut novel in verse, set in early 1990s New York City. ... Readers will find this tender and realistic portrait of first love hard to forget.

With an energy and attitude closer to Lin Manuel Miranda's In the Heights than West Side Story, the spoken-word style of Park's wildly creative rendition will entrance readers.