Percussing the Thinking Jar from Omnidawn, Fall 2024

Shortlisted for the 2025 Northern California Book Award for Poetry

Maw Shein Win

In Percussing the Thinking Jar, her third full-length poetry collection, Maw Shein Win reveals how a mind can log thoughts and observations. Through deft braiding of the pleasures, pains, and anxieties of living in a human body, Win has developed new forms which carry the reader to realms that are both deeply personal and universal. These poems are rendered with dreamlike imagery and surprising humor. This generous collection includes 16 Sumi ink drawings by artist Mark Dutcher. Interwoven through the poems, his drawings highlight juxtapositions and counterpoint rhythms inspired by the poems. Reflecting on our strange times, Percussing the Thinking Jar is a hypnotic book that invites readers into conversation with their own vulnerability and resilience.

Reviews

Review of Percussing the Thinking Jar by C. Pirloul-Broshi

Essay in Tupelo Quarterly by rae diamond on Percussing the Thinking Jar

Review in the Washington Independent Review of Books

Review of Percussing the Thinking Jar in The Racket

Review of Percussing the Thinking Jar by rob mclennan

Northern California Book Reviewers (2025)

In her arresting Percussing the Thinking Jar, Win dwells on the nature of thinking and how it can it be manifested in language. What emerges from these questions is a new process for making poems called the “thought log,” an experimental short lyric in which Win seems to trickle her observations, feelings, and memories onto the page. These poems resist rhetoric. They depend instead on a logic of movement that feels true to human nature. Win’s accretions of language resolve into many organic shapes, though some seem to absorb the formal energies of haiku, tanka, and haibun. One of Win’s “Thought Log” poems begins, “We communicate via semaphore. // The neighbor boy stuck a wad of chewing gum in my hair. My / mother rubbed butter on the clump to dissolve it. // A coalition of farmers in Central California. // The napes of our necks. // Red Clover, Ruda, Amarantus.” That last line, a triple set of images or words that Win turns to again and again, serve as a through-line (or maybe drum-line) in this truly innovative book, which evokes the power of the poet inhabiting her days as a medium of utterance and experience.

Roxi Power: Introduction to Maw Shein Win’s reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz July 2026 for the Hive Live! reading series by The Hive Poetry Collective (2026)

The table of contents in Maw Shein Win’s newest book, Percussing the Thinking Jar, reads like a log of logs percussed into repeated instances. Thought Log, Stroke Log, Weather Log, Catalog, Bokchoy Log, Hyphen Log, Grapefruit Log, Sensation Log, Syllabus Log, Sleep Log, Observation Log, Log Thought.

Maw Shein Win kept track of, or musical tracks on, her thinking during the Covid years. But lest you think these are like logs kept by 19th century ship captains observing long, lonely days on the sea punctuated by dramatic storms—i.e. Covid health crises––Maw speckles the log-poems with surreal images and sounds that pulse like Kristeva’s chora: bright respite from the monotone delirium of those years. There are playful sonic interludes with deep meanings––”bloke trolls, logo mills, cure oils”. She asks, “how do we fold into each other?” then enfolds us in her “logo mills”, her sounds and visions. Pound said a good image should be a vortex and Win got the memo.

Some of her poems are about sounds, and many are funny: “I want to make a living playing air drums on YouTube.” Though she doesn’t consider herself a musician, Maw was a drummer in a post-punk band in college. I’m fascinated by her Thinking Jar––as if Wallace Stevens’ famous modernist jar, that causes the wilderness to rise up around it, returns to us as Win’s poetic mind shaping the chaotic pandemic environment into art.

One of my favorite poets, John Yau, blurbed her book: “It does something no other poetry book I have read does: it offers ‘diaphanous comfort’ while we are at the ‘chaos party’.”

Within her invented forms––the Thought Logs have 16 lines and 7 other rules––her swift thoughts are like colorful beads jostling in a jar of observations she shakes rhythmically. No time to percuss for long on even the most jarring revelations. In Sleep Log, she writes “My older sister visits me. She died six years ago. She swings a leopard skin pouch around on a golden chain, she is glowing. I whisper: everything is going to be okay.”

And even though everything is clearly not okay during the pandemic, there is comfort in lines like this about a lost long ago: “a dream of granny in a flower longyi. I cry in her lap.” A longyi is a lower-body garment in Myanmar, or Burma, where Maw’s family is from. The poems are laced with loss. Her mother’s loss of language after a stroke her daughter logged like beautiful found poetry: “We will see you all the time. Please we will see you. Never please we do. Always have Bokchok please.”

This is in reference to Maw’s beloved cat, Bokchoy, who makes an appearance in this poem as loss, contained in a cedar box, just another of the many containers in this book, from jars to logs to pages. And there are forms of punctuation that act as containers too. The ubiquitous brackets that contain logical information like [Preventing brain tissue from getting oxygen and nutrients] or [Encourage the stroke survivor to fully scan their surroundings to compensate for any loss in their field of vision of left-side neglect.] In this way, the brackets are asides, containers of sense in an era where medicalized language is whispered, intimate, privatized to avoid backlash.

Mark Dutcher’s drawings in the book are islands of abstraction with open frames, another set of containers like Maw’s thinking jars that free us from the compulsion to make sense of the pandemic’s absurdities. Hers are populated by sleeping antelopes, piles of pink shells, and fire ant eyes. Both forms lead us into a wonderland where we wonder whether those years starting in 2020 were just a dream.

The italicized final word pairs in her “Log Thoughts” stop us from the irritable reaching after fact and reason as Keats defined negative capability. In these seeming koans like “interrogate, vault,” the reader rests in the space between words that resist the logic of logs. It’s as if, along with all that we lost during the pandemic, our language was flying away from us from disuse in our lonely vaults and all we could do was be curious, interrogate. Reach out and capture words like flickering fireflies in a jar, that is our mind reading Maw Shein Win’s poetry.

You can experience her famous musicality within a poem entitled “Music” in the forthcoming anthology I edited, Winter in America (Still: Poets, Writers, and Artists Respond to a Fractured World when Santa Cruz poets in the book read at Bookshop on August 25.

Roxi Power is a poet, performer, and publisher whose book, The Songs That Objects Would Sing was published in 2023. She co-edited Winter in America (Again: Poets Respond to 2024 Election (Carbonation Press, 2025), Winter in America (Still: Poets, Writers, and Artists Respond to a Fractured World (forthcoming, Summer 2026), and founded the trans-genre anthology series, Viz. Inter-Arts, at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she teaches. She is also Contributing Editor for En°Trance Journal. Roxi podcasts and organizes readings for The Hive Poetry Collective in Santa Cruz. She performs Live Film Narration––“Neo-Benshi"––nationally. She received an AWP Intro Award and publications in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Puerto del Sol, Seneca Review, Axon etc. She received an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University.

Music

Thought Logs, a new album by Vata & the Vine

**Poems from Percussing the Thinking Jar recently published**

Process Note published in Issue 17 of Omnium Gatherum Quarterly

Poem in The Cortland Review, Issue 94

Poem published in The Nature of Our Times

The DMQ Virtual Salon

Five poems in The American Poetry Review, Jan/Feb 2025 Issue

“Sensation Log" in The American Poetry Review

Two Poems in AAWW translated by Kenneth Wong

”Hyphen Log” in The Bangalore Review

For more poetry read by Maw Shein Win, scroll to the bottom of the page.

Interviews

Interview in JMWW by Swetha Amit

Poetic Justice on Insight Myanmar

Cheers To Us Podcast w/ Neda Serrami

Podcast Interview w/ Julia Chiapella of The Hive Poetry Collective

Endorsements

Percussing the Thinking Jar is a marvel of lyric invention. The “thought logs”; make stream of consciousness feel new. Stroke log, vertigo log, anxiety meditations, wild ideas: no idea or language is out of Win’s reach. This is original, gorgeous, engrossing poetry.

—Lee Herrick, poet laureate of California, and author of In Praise of Late Wonders: New and Selected Poems

Lately I’ve been worrying about poetic style, which is a branched variation of the poet’s perpetual subject of worry, language. Maw Shein Win’s Percussing the Thinking Jar took me a step away from such worrying, weighted though the poems are with worry. Here are poems in which a love of the sounds and textures of words is manifestly a determining stylistic priority, poems that, consequently, are richly musical, and feature lines that expertly play their rhythms against each other-- “vesper flux, pressure switch // I close my eyes & tap the lid.” How beautifully the ampersand in the second, iambic tetrameter line both acknowledges--insofar as it is as much a symbol as a syllable--and supplies the unstressed syllable missing in the first, not-quite iambic tetrameter line! I’m grateful for that music, that style.

—Shane McCrae, author of Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of A Kidnapping

Percussing the Thinking Jar is a multisensory experience befitting Maw Shein Win, an artist who works and collaborates across disciplines and genres. An inventive collection of “logs” recorded over several years during and after lockdown, this book is a kind of Golden Record, snapshots of a restless roving mind trying to make sense of and connect to the world through personal and global cataclysms. Here, the mundane mingles with existential fears, medical procedures, contemporary art, apparitions of flora and fauna, and much more. Piercing reflections (‘I am blinking into another eye.’) are juxtaposed with luscious phrases (“Vata & the Vine, Pitta of the Mind, Kapha & its Kind”), forming a haunting dreamscape that indeed “astonish[es] with sonic delight.”

—Jenny Qi, author of Focal Point

Percussing the Thinking Jar is a breath of fresh air. A clarity. An order to the pandemonium of a global pandemic. Death becomes inescapable and each log constructs a life raft to navigate the uncertainty of being a body driven by its desire for aliveness. At any moment anything can happen, so why not let poetry happen? Why not fortify the isolated and aging body with “metaphor quarries”? With “hands [that] tremble quiet,” Maw Shein Win offers observations that defamiliarize and sensate narratives that bring new value to our “post-capitalist worth.” Percussing the Thinking Jar transforms human afflictions into a different organ for perception.

—Arisa White, author of Who’s Your Daddy?

In “Thought Log about Thought Logs,” the last poem in Maw Shein Win’s book, Percussing the Thinking Jar, the poet begins: “I started writing thought logs in spring 2020/Response to isolation, scatter, containment.” In her liminal poems, Win sensitively and precisely registers the pulse of living through the pandemic, alert to how daily life has changed, how magnified the smallest details have become, how “everything is phenomena,” and how nothing can “last forever.” Amidst the deaths and stillness, the nurse’s instructions, shopping for “peanut brittle online,” “mastering the art of doing nothing,” and listening to “roadrunners,” Win stays open to whatever the world throws at her, its gradations, shifts, and ruptures. This is a book to read and reread. It does something no other poetry book I have read does: it offers “diaphanous comfort” while we are at the “chaos party.”

—John Yau, author of Tell it Slant

This page was created by Jerry Feist