Written across fall and winter 2023, Autumnal is a daily reckoning with memory, exile, and devotion. Burmese-Chin poet Aidii composes from a life lived between the Chin hills, Yangon, and Indianapolis—a city now known as “Chindianapolis”, home to the largest Chin community outside Myanmar.
A poem a day, through falling leaves and deepening snow.
Her poems carry the hymnal pulse of tradition and the raw nerve of modern
displacement. Like Emily Dickinson, whose disciplined practice she echoes, Aidii draws beauty and gravity from compressed forms. But hers is also a voice shaped by migration, single motherhood, diasporic resistance, and survivor guilt.
I need 314 hours a day
to be able to sleep sufficiently,
to play with my child, to make home.
Translated with care and poetic intuition by ko ko thett, Autumnal is a first-of-its-kind English-language collection from a Burmese woman poet writing on motherhood, faith, exile, and the brutal generosity of memory. This is poetry as lifeline, confession, and a bridge between cultures and memory.