Dear friend of Arkadia, You are heartily invited to ‘Bones Will Crow’, a poetry evening, by ko ko thett and James Byrne on Friday 29.7 at 6pm. ‘Bones Will Crow’ is an anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry by co-editors ko ko thett and James Byrne. The event will be in English and you are all very welcome! Warm regards, Ian www.arkadiabookshop.fi – Entrance is free and green tea will be served. A donation of €2 (or more!) is suggested and would be very welcome. ko ko thett grew up in Burma, performing poems at school competitions and town halls. By the early 1990s, he was thoroughly poeticized and politicized at Yangon Institute of Technology. In 1996, he published and clandestinely distributed two chapbooks of verses on the campus, ‘The Rugged Gold’ and ‘The Funeral of the Rugged Gold,’ without getting the approval of Myanmar censorship authorities. He left the country in 1997 following a brief detention for his role in the December 1996 student uprising in Rangoon. He has written extensively on the country’s politics mainly for the Irrawaddy Magazine and leading papers in Finland. Since 2000, his ‘Burmese poems in English’ have sporadically appeared in a number of Burma-related blogs and journals. James Byrne graduated from the MFA program at New York University, where he was on a Stein Scholarship (‘Extraordinary International Scholar’). He is the editor of The Wolf, an internationally renowned poetry magazine. His second collection in the UK, Blood/Sugar, was published by Arc Publications in November 2009. In 2008, Byrne won Treci Trg poetry festival prize in Serbia. In 2009 his Selected Poems: The Vanishing House was published by Treci Trg (in a bilingual edition) in Belgrade. He is the co-editor of Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, an anthology of poets under 35, published by Bloodaxe in 2009. The poet John Kinsella wrote on the jacket for his most recent book: ‘James Byrne is a phenomenon and Blood/Sugar is astonishing…He is a complete original.’