The Personal and Political Entwined

Early on in Burmese Lessons: A Love Story, Karen Connelly notices something about the way she talks. At a dinner party in Bangkok, while journalists and consultants create in board strokes what might be called the Bigger Picture—the history of Burma and region, an encyclopedia of issues—Connelly finds she is “always reaching for the detail, or the individual, or the subjective truth contained in the particular moment. That’s how poets talk, and women.” For readers who favour the Bigger Picture approach, sweeping in its historical research, devoid of personal commentary (or indeed experience), I highly recommend Burmese Lessons. In quietly beautiful, searching prose, Connelly shows us the small stories: the child labourer straining under loads of wet cement, a woman wailing over her son’s corpse in a refugee camp, a mother hiding protestors in the room where her children are asleep.

Connelly, author of nine books of poetry, non-fiction and fiction...