About this book: From the reviving joy of monsoon rains and the scorching smoke of Indian-Malaysian funeral rituals to the quiet solace of an evening garden, from the shallow seas around her homeland to the violence of Atlantic nor’easter and Pacific winter storms, Shymala Dason’s Carrying the Ocean invites us into the immigrant journey. These intimate, personal poems move from the Malaysia of the writer’s childhood to America and back again, pausing frequently to examine the cost and consequences of such journeys. These poems are for all who have traveled from home.

Carrying the Ocean

Shymala Dason’s Carrying the Ocean explores belonging and unbelonging in immigrant and family life, drawing from her own immigrant journey from the monsoons of Malaysia to the Atlantic nor’easters and Pacific coast storms of the United States.

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Bios

Short: Shymala Dason is a first-generation immigrant from Malaysia to the US, and the child of second-generation immigrants from India to Malaysia. She was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor short fiction collection award. Her work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Literary Review, The Margins, and elsewhere. She is also a developmental editor and writing coach. Carrying the Ocean, her poetry debut, is on presale at Finishing Line Press.

Long: Shymala Dason is a poet, teacher, writer, and editor; a first-generation immigrant to the US from Malaysia, a cancer survivor, and a former NASA tech. Her writing centers on belonging and unbelonging in immigrant and family life. Her published work includes poetry, literary fiction, creative non-fiction, and speculative fiction. Her writing has appeared in literary magazines including The Massachusetts Review, The Margins, Hyphen, the Asian American Writers Workshop (AAWW) war anthology, Duende, The Literary Review, Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, The Gateway Review, et al. She has been shortlisted for the Flannery O’Connor Award, the AAWW & Hyphen short fiction award, and longlisted for the Bath Novel Award and the Mslexia Novel Award. Carrying the Ocean is her poetry debut, now on presale at Finishing Line Press.

Deep background: Available here on her website.

Poems from the book

Dirty Shoes

I kicked a soccer ball in Malaysia; they put me out of kindergarten,

in Kuala Lumpur, 1965, with aunties praying over me in relays, “Save this wild child.”

Forty-five years pass. Aunties, those alive, unstoppable, praying all the while.

As I sit in California reading email, a primary school classmate

now in Australia tells me we had dirty shoes back then, from kicking stones,

with our mothers mourning in a circle, “Ragamuffin daughters. What to do?”

Emigration! Send them off to Europe, America, Australia,

Tell your friends, “Daughter is Doing Well. Overseas.”

Nobody can see her shoes.

Girls practicing soccer near my American home are as grubby and sticky as any boys,

ponytails everywhere, bobbing, the only sign they’re actually girls: liberated –

nothing to do with jobs or voting,

our Kuala Lumpur mothers were right about emigration.

Benefits of overseas life. Freedom to get dirty,

that’s what. Running. Shouting. Playing.

Invitation to Grief Video poem

Come to the ocean at Monterey, please

on a winter’s day. It will be wicked cold.

Come naked anyway. I want to understand

all of you. Want to wash us all over

in the water, let breakers push us off our feet

then conquer the undertow of the riptide

or else be swept out to sea and drowned to

resurrect as something new.

Brown pelicans will swoop over us

seals dance in the waves ignoring us. See

tiny shorebirds scurry back and forth, busy,

not noticing us. We do not matter

to the tapestry of life: are only

one creature among many creatures.

Perhaps we will come out of the water with

a banquet, built together on driftwood fire,

of harvested salt-rich superfood greens

and accepted bounty of shellfish

that died to feed us.

I read this into the wind

knowing you can hear me,

being everywhere and nowhere.

Take on a body, Brown like me

with too much unruly hair, and

come. Crystalize yourself out of the wind.

Soften and warm into life. Speak with me.

Explain the riddles of absence,

Hunger, need,

where there is plenty all around.

An ocean of plenty.

And if you don’t

the cold is bliss too. So, I tell you

I will practice feeling bliss in freezing. I tell you

do not mask the presence, immanence,

of that bliss with absences,

losses that mean, at the very core

there are things good enough to miss.

Worth the pain. Do not

dare try to make me forget this.

When you come, I shake.

Wind, no doubt. Or possibly awe:

knowing you have more power than I.

But knowing also the ocean will feed salt

life into me if we quarrel.

Ice Skater

I see you, trembling on sharp blades

over a surface of unsettling, brilliant white.

You don’t even know how to put the shoes on right.

Rubber slippers were enough

for where you came from.

Growing up walking beside salt-sweet surf

under coconut trees

and smelling bougainvillea and jasmine

in your mother’s garden.

Thinking about dinner.

You’ll have all your favorite things, at home.

Your mother knows what they are.

Along the way you would buy a coffee

foaming cream, and hot,

from a tin-roofed shack lighted only by a kerosene lamp,

while mosquitoes feed on the salt-sweet sweat

around your ankles and you nibble on a jellabi

as rich oil oozes onto your fingers.

But now, you have cold ankles,

in a cold country, and you’re trying to skate.

But, what if the ice breaks?

Namaste (Audio)

The father of an Indian daughter

Who is doing well in America is excited

to receive a plane ticket, from a daughter

who says, ‘Appa, please

come and visit me.’

But then, once out of the airplane

In America, he sees his suitcase.

It looks different. Less.

Back home, visiting his parents, in

their village (it’s poor there),

taxi-drivers carrying that same suitcase

from the bus-stop call him, ‘Sir.’

Now, in this American airport, he sees

his daughter’s eyes hold embarrassment;

Sees her thinking: Appa is not doing

so well as his daughter. What is he to do?

He’s done: holding a baby. Saving. Praying.

Wishing a better life someday, for her.

Now he worries: because he never bowed his head before strangers.

The daughter thinks, as she makes the call

I have served flowers at holiday feasts

carrying a silver tray, jasmine

strands touching my fingers.

Sometimes my elders gave me saffron to hold

Or rosewater, to bless the head of the arriving guests.

Now, in this austere land: isolate, how will I

offer welcome? I cannot find the balm

of incense here, nor

holy saffron thread. There is no salt, no ritual

water. Only me. I am a vessel without ornament.

Namaste

Reviews

Blurbs

In her gorgeous and absolutely gripping collection, Shymala Dason offers us the world in water, immersing us without drowning. The poems are dripping with imagery and wonder, written in elegant verse that ask us to slow down and notice. She brings the reader on a journey rich with slow laughter and gentle tears, moving us back and forth across the ocean in waves; some gentle, some epic, then laying us back on the shore to stare at the changing sky and remember.

Suzi Q. Smith, author of Poems for the End of the World.

As someone who never felt like he belonged somewhere, this book reminds me that perhaps this exact feeling is what stitches us all together. Shymala takes us through the footpaths and rivulets of her memories and resurrects a time where she ‘dreamt foolishly.’ As I witnessed these poems emerge in South Asian diaspora open mics during the pandemic, and now as I read the finished poems, I hope—for all our sake—that there is no other way to dream.

Aditya Surendran, author of CheeseDosa: The Legend-Dairy Tales of a Suburban Dork.

Shymala Dason crafts poems that interweave personal and cultural memories with deep reflections on loss, belonging, and identity, grounded in her experience as an immigrant. From the reviving monsoon rains of Malaysia to the storms of the Atlantic and Pacific, Dason takes readers on a profound journey that spans continents, cultures, and time. The saying is, ‘You can’t go home again.’ Dason both embraces that idea, and puts a unique spin on it. The final lines of the closing poem are, ‘I carry ocean.’ I admire those three words, so perfectly placed, so multilayered. This gorgeous book is for all who travel, who dream, and who seek home along the way.

Malaika King Albrecht, author of The Stumble Fields.

Sample questions and answers

Question: This book seems to celebrate the violence of storms, while also talking about how destructive they are. How do you resolve this duality/conflict?

Answer: There’s two levels to this. One is simple. Just as, no matter how sophisticated we get, the food of our childhood always brings comfort, so does the weather of our childhood. A child of the monsoons remembers the smell of rain riding on a strong wind, and every other similar storm triggers that sense of childhood familiarity. Except for my first winter drenching in San Francisco, where I discovered getting soaked through to my underwear is not so fun when it’s cold! That’s the first level. The second is deeper. Mythological, perhaps. Violent storms can be destructive, but they can also give a feeling, particularly in that smell of strong wind where the storm is coming but not yet arrived, give a sense, a hope and promise, of sweeping the world clean. None of us love destruction, but we would all like to see less bad stuff in the world.

Question: These poems speak with love and intimacy about wildly varied and far-flung locations. But there’s often a sense of loss as well as love, as if the poet is deeply present and yet an outsider.

Answer: I have lived, and loved, many places. Trees, grass, frogs, snails, chickens or seals, in each place there is something to love and to bind one’s heart to. But, this is the immigrant paradox – and it’s certainly not unique to me, or even to immigrants, though we may experience it more intensely – anyone who’s moved from one place to another, even if they love where they ended up, will sometimes find themselves nostalgic for where they used to be. And then we travel home for a reunion or something, and find that, whoops, the shoes we thought were so comfortable don’t fit so well any more because our feet have changed, or our ideas about the colors of shoes. Or taste of food, or weather, or the way people talk and think. Life is change, and that’s a gift, but embracing that gift sometimes involves accepting discomfort. For an immigrant, that’s the discomfort of having the heart split between two – or more – places.

Other sample questions

What was your journey from NASA to poetry? From a childhood on the other side of the world to NASA?
What would you say is a perfect writing day?
Malaysia has a reputation as a foodie destination. What is Malaysian food, and how does it come into your work? What is your relationship to food?
You grew up in Malaysia as a third-generation immigrant from India, and then moved to the United States. What effect has immigration had on your family? On their (and your) self-image and identity?

Other suggested topics