Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Under the Weeping Fig: Thai Poems of Love & Loss

Under the Weeping Fig: Thai Poems of Love & Loss

David, Ajarn

Paperback

Series: Thai Way, Book 3

Fiction AnthologiesGeneral PoetrySoutheast Asia

ISBN13: 9798274701747
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 28 2026
Pages: 160
Weight: 0.38
Height: 0.37 Width: 5.25 Depth: 8.00
Language: English

Ajarn David's first bilingual Thai-English collection, Poems from Sakon Nakhon, mapped the landscape, culture, and language of northeastern Thailand through years of lived experience there. Under the Weeping Fig (Thai Poems of Love & Loss) turns that same clarity inward - toward the feelings of the people who live there.

The world is the same Isaan world: jasmine garlands at intersections, forest temples in the Phu Phan mountains, the Mekong at sunset. But the gaze is focused on the heart.

Written simultaneously in Thai and English by a poet who has spent twenty-four years absorbing Buddhist sensibility, Thai folk wisdom, and the emotional rhythms of local life, these seventy-two poems move through love the way love actually moves: with longing, humor, quiet grief, and the occasional sentence too plain to forget.

A woman dreams of one perfect day in Chiang Khan with the man she loves. A teacher keeps calling the roll after an empty chair appears. A monk offers wisdom through a papaya that will either fall or become som tam.

The collection opens with a two-line aphorism about the nature of poetry and continues through poems of affection, absence, memory, regret, and spiritual reflection. Alongside its images, it draws on the long Asian tradition of the wisdom verse: the short, plain-spoken teaching that arrives with a truth clear enough to stay with you.

One love as non-striving. One traveling light. One need for gratitude. These are not aphorisms dressed in poetic clothing; they are brief poems shaped by Buddhist teaching, Thai folk wisdom, and two decades of lived experience between the two.

The bilingual architecture marks a departure from Ajarn David's first book. In Poems from Sakon Nakhon, the Thai versions were accomplished translations made after the English. Here, both languages arrived often simultaneously.

Thai appears first throughout - not as translation but as primary text, with the English following as its companion. The English is compressed into breath-sized lines, where white space performs the emotion; the Thai achieves the same effect through the conversational intimacy the language demands. Romanized pronunciation guides beneath each Thai poem make them speakable, not just readable, for every audience.

Perfect for: readers of Poems from Sakon Nakhon ready for the next chapter; anyone who has loved and lost and wondered if the right words existed; Thai language learners and expatriates; poets and readers of world literature seeking an intimate alternative to more conventional contemporary free verse.

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