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updates, updates, udpates!

The last year and a half has submerged me in personal matters, so here are a few long overdue updates:

I won an NEA fellowship! It was my first time applying! I am learning to ask for things.

MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems was named a “Best Book of 2018” by Publishers Weekly! Still can't quite believe this one. The book received a starred review: “In this exhilarating exploration, Cheng fashions an alt-epic for the 21st century, upending received ideas about poetic form and constructing from the debris a hybrid guide for an age of diaspora and displacement.”

Finally, a new poem: “Vulnerable Nettle” in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

An astonishing and miraculous review in The Rumpus that includes a letter, a map, and a poem: “Reading Moon was a hypnotic experience... simultaneously immersive and elusive. I’d surface from the pages having lost track of time, sensing the world around me had shifted, subtly, but unable to pinpoint how. How, after all, do you describe the force field of a particular literary project?”

Upcoming readings in Portland (at AWP and offsite) and Iowa City (at Prairie Lights and the Mission Creek Festival)! That is, I shall finally be returning to the town of my first MFA program ten years after I left, and I am extremely anxious.

HOUSE A reflections: readings, reviews, interviews

I think it's hilarious that I'm posting a reflection about my first book after the publication of my second book. My enneagram is Type 4, and one of the descriptions tells me that I tend to linger in "preparing" mode because I never feel ready. Anyway, as I was planning for the release of my book MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems earlier this summer, I spent time reflecting back on HOUSE A. I tend to get lost in various anxieties, so I want to carve out at a space to appreciate the brighter moments.

Readings:

I was uncertain about putting together readings, but I ended up visiting six cities, because others reached out, because my own efforts. At my book launch, I read while projections of the ocean and geometric images shifted behind me. Other memorable events included Poets House in NYC with Omnidawn poets, Open Books in Seattle with Kaveh Ackbar and Paige Lewis, and California Institute for Integral Studies (I enjoyed discussing my book with the moderator for the "in conversation" portion of this event). Most of all I loved visiting classes, skyping with classes, wandering together with students into the mysterious terrain of poetry and writing. The students were particularly thoughtful, curious readers, wrestling with the same questions I do.

Reviews:

An accumulation of book reviews for House A: Publishers Weekly, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, PEN HK, DIAGRAM and others... So many of these are in themselves beautiful essays that are pleasurable to read, but even beyond that, I did not anticipate what a gift it would be to feel so seen by strangers. I did not know what it would feel like to have a person read my words with such care and thought, making their own connections and bringing their experiences and methods of navigating into its light.

The reviews describe and analyze my book: in light of the impossibility, infinity, and intimacy of lyric address (LARB); as a triptych of lyric essays comprising smaller lyric essays, an immigrant's decentering of boundaries in both home and literary form (DIAGRAM); in terms of my own critical work into refractive poetics (Massachusetts Review); with the words "trembling" and "oscillating" and "tidal tongue" (Columbia Poetry Review). And it was particularly special to be featured in the May/June 2017 issue of the Brown Alumni Magazine.

Interviews:

I loved engaging in interviews, being in conversation, mulling over questions and my own writing process. I spent the most time on this one in The Conversant. This one in the Rumpus felt vulnerable, discussing the current political context and its implications for poetry. And this one with Vi Khi Nao in the Los Angeles Review of Books blog was adventurous because it was conducted textually in real time in a Google doc.

#poetry #LARB #DIAGRAM #Columbia Poetry Review #Massachusetts Review #Brown Alumni Magazine #the rumpus #House A #Moon: Letters Maps Poems #jennifer s. cheng

2018 & belated updates

I spent this winter thinking back on the troubling year--the constant hum of anxiety and my unhealthy defense mechanisms. I want this next year to be a turn: I want to reclaim my daily rhythms and textures, my experiments, my internal and external motionings. To that end, I'm concocting various intentions and plans, small things such as take more walks or learn to embroider, and bigger ones, too. I am intending to be a tiny bit more confident with book matters this time around. I am intending to give more space to my triumphs (rather than to give all the space to my shortcomings). I am intending to seek/build meaningful community by being less afraid. I am intending to resist paralysis/inertia/staying silent/dehumanizing infrastructures. I will probably largely fall short at all this, but I also trust that I will make tiny steps. So much of 2017 was spent in murky, chaotic anxieties (my panic attacks resurged), but I hope this year I can attempt to gather the threads of my inner life once again.

In writing news, I still managed to publish work in 2017 from my forthcoming book. Chen Chen reached out to me for the National Poetry Month issue of Iron Horse Literary Review, where he also interviewed me on the negative space between things and using untranslated language. The editor of Tupelo Quarterly, where I've published before, also reached out. A couple poems made it into the Asian American publication Hyphen.

Foundry nominated a piece for the Pushcart Prize. The Adroit Journal nominated a piece for Best Small Fictions.

I'm ready for this year to be all Moon 🌑🌒🌓.

#poetry #prose poetry #iron horse Literary Review #Tupelo Quarterly #foundry journal #the adroit journal #hyphen magazine #jennifer s. cheng #chen chen #publication #poem #prose poem #moon

MY SECOND BOOK !!!!!!!

It came faster than anticipated, but Bhanu Kapil chose my manuscript MOON: LETTERS, MAPS, POEMS as winner of the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize, and I am all moon/waves/more! It is a dream come true; I love Bhanu's work, and while writing this MS I kept feeling it belonged in the feral/hybrid/otherly TS world. I don’t feel like the project is completely finished, but I’m excited to re-imagine it a bit with Bhanu’s help.

It’s my wild child manuscript, strange writings I started seven years ago during my Fulbright in Hong Kong—a fitful period of reentering the world after years of being shut—and that I continued writing whenever I needed Chang ‘E 嫦娥’s voice to say the things I could not say except into the darkest corner of the room. The book draws loosely on the folktale of the Lady in the Moon, along with other Chinese mythologies centering around women.

You can view one of the poems here. I wrote a craft essay on it for Black Warrior Review. And an in-progress excerpt from another section of the book appears in The Offing.

#tarpaulin sky #bhanu kapil #poetry book #second book #prose poetry

Poetry Northwest & The Gift

Delayed as ever, but I have three oceanic poems at Poetry Northwest!

Unrelated: I’ve been reading very slowly and in circular motions The Gift, thinking about the deep desire to be free of ego-driven, exchange-structured interactions…how the ritual of freely giving/receiving “gifts” binds and bonds a community together, how this require a transcendent space beyond that is mysterious, into which and from which all “gifts” move. There’s something compelling to me in the necessity of a “sense of imbalance, of shifting weight.”

The book is ultimately about artistic practice, but I’ve also been thinking lately about community and how to navigate relationships poetically, about how I tend to keep smaller circles because I’m wary of transactionally driven interactions, seeking instead relationships built on vulnerability, bewilderment, non-conditional generosity. I suppose I’m protective of myself, which limits me, but I’m also in search of something rather specific. Anyway, some passages:

“A market exchange has an equilibrium or stasis: you pay to balance the scale. But when you give a gift there is momentum, and the weight shifts from body to body.”

“For we are only alive to the degree that we can let ourselves be moved.”

This one is specifically about artmaking and speaks to that space beyond: “If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible.”

#poetry northwest #poetry #poem #ocean poem #the gift

new multimodal essay

I am in love with this map-obsessed journal, Territory, and honored to contribute with a multimodal essay, “Toward a Poetics of Phantom Limb, or All the Shadows that Carry Us.”

Leftover ghosts from my book? Or endnotes? In this essay I am mapping the body in order to elucidate how excavated immigrant histories are still felt or sensed: absence as presence.

Also, I like how the image becomes bisected/nested by all the angles and lines.

(Shout-out to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee & Monica Ong’s Silent Anatomies, both works that incorporate body mapping and are part of my canon.)

I came across this little write-up about my essay (from wildness): “ ‘I map the ghosts; the ghosts map me.’ There aren’t a lot of available terms to describe the experience of Jennifer S. Cheng’s piece in the current issue of Territory. You click on the numbers that adorn an image of a body mapped out for acupuncture and up pop boxes of text that are in conversation with the image as well as with multiple of other narratives: the body, ancestry, home, memory. We frequently look to the body as a vessel of evidence, but Cheng is interested in absence, in what isn’t there anymore and the memory left behind.”

#hybrid essay #lyric essay #multimodal #territory #image text

i miss posting about things i love

There are few things that stir me so deeply, and I have few words for it. I have written about her work before in Jacket2: “Francesca Capone: Text(ure), Refracting Language.” Something about translation moves me, the refraction that occurs in translating between mediums. Something about textile as a socially female domain. Something about hiding words and documents inside something else we make with our bodies.

“I see textile as a forbearer of linguistic traditions. Throughout history textiles have been used as a place for recording information and for telling stories.” (The Creators Project)

And: “They would document stitches, materials, and all this stuff that men hadn't paid attention to. It was very much a reclaiming of women's knowledge... re-asserting needlework and textiles as a legitimate art practice.” (i-D)

post-election poem + the offing + pushcart prize nominations

The only thing I could write in these last weeks is up at Tarpaulin Sky: “Inside Our Killing.” It is an attempt to give myself relief by giving something language. Thank you to TS for opening up this space. Read more post-election texts (“to survive, to speak”) here.

Happy to have new hybrid (fiction? poetry? essay?) writing in The Offing. “Moon; Iterations” is based on the tale of Chang ‘E (the whole piece is 34 sections), related to my other poems about the lady in the moon. Thank you to The Offing for inviting me to send these.

More moon news: One of those poems “From the Voice of the Lady in the Moon” received a Pushcart Prize nomination from Black Warrior Review, one of my most favorite journals to read. You can view a poem and my craft essay a couple posts below. I am also very honored that Cherry Tree nominated one of the “Letters to Mao” in my book.

#the offing #black warrior review #prose poetry #tarpaulin sky #election poem

pub day + interview + book party!

It's the official publication day for my book, HOUSE A, selected by Claudia Rankine ♥ ︎as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize!

Here is an interview in the Conversant, in which I discuss: how and why I began writing letters to Mao; a course I once took called Archaeology of Anthropology; the politics of “reading” wall textures and diagrams of plant dissections as if they were blueprints; my kinship with the lyric essay as a poet; shadows; jellyfish.

“There is a way in which second-generation children are constantly reconciling outside/inside spheres, like the Mao in U.S. consciousness and the Mao in my house. While writing these poems, I was thinking about this tension and how the body unconsciously absorbs the years of war, famine, fear, and separation in inexplicable ways. Where in the house is it located—in the lamplight, the placement of objects, movements of bodies? I am interested in the interactions of histories in a household: personal history, family history, and History. Intersection implies a point, but this is more like ocean waves meeting, a convergence of tenderness, loss, protection, vigilance, rootedness and unrootedness. The ocean emerges as a metaphor and guiding rhythm: 'And if water is a metaphor, then it is because water fills up a room, slow-moving, blurry, immersive but obscured.’”

Purchase HOUSE A at Omnidawn, UPNE, or Amazon.

And mark your calendars: Book Party for HOUSE A!

When: October 21 @ 7pm Where: Alley Cat Books (3036 24th St.), San Francisco, CA

There will be a reading, a projector with images, favorite childhood snacks, adult drinks, and I will be wearing new nail polish and old shoes. Here is the Facebook event.

Other upcoming events will be updated here, including:

10/11 Litquake: Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco, CA, 12:30p 10/14 Omnidawn Fall Authors: Moe's Books, Berkeley, CA, 7p 11/3 Omnidawn Reading: Berl's Poetry Shop, Brooklyn, NY, 7p 11/4 Omnidawn Reading: Poets House, NYC, NY, 6p

#poetry #poetry reading #omnidawn #conversant #interview #poets house #alley cat books #berl's brooklyn poetry shop #moe's books #litquake #house a #letters to mao

The Margins + Best of the Net nomination

Two more "Letters to Mao" from my forthcoming book are online in The Margins (Asian American Writers' Workshop)! It's especially meaningful to me for these poems to have a home with a journal and organization so close to my heart.

And thank you to The Volta and Joshua Marie Wilkinson for nominating my poem "Velella" for the Best of the Net anthology! The Volta continues to be one of my favorites to read, always beautiful.

#poetry #poem #letters to mao #the volta #velella #best of the net #the margins #prose poem #prose poetry #asian american writers workshop

other ways of seeing: the poetics and politics of refraction

For three months, I am excited to be writing for Jacket2 on “Other Ways of Seeing: The Poetics and Politics of Refraction.” I wanted to write this series as a way to deepen my exploration of certain works of art that have come to preoccupy me, while thinking about a topic I find compelling. The first and second articles are already up, and I'll be posting new ones each week. Artists whose work I will explore: Christine Sun Kim, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cybele Lyle, Kara Walker, M. NourbeSe Philip, Francesca Capone.

A description of my series: "In renaming the world anew, poets and artists engage in acts of “translation” that are intentionally askew. What truths and beauties are revealed in such blurry distortions of our world, and what is at stake in this moment of refraction for poets and artists from the margins? While we are familiar with Dickinson’s dictate Tell all the truth but tell it slant, I explore these angles through the lens of visual and mixed media—artwork that function as poems in miraculous ways—with the belief that they shed light on the poetics of language by manifesting it viscerally and tangibly. Simultaneously, I take the study of refraction further by examining how oblique renderings of status-quo notions urge the audience to inhabit non-dominant spaces of perception that challenge the terms of their reality. These artists demonstrate how refractive poetries invoke alternative or marginal perspectives, constructing new meaning by moving beyond normalized ways of experiencing the world."

#jacket2 #poetics

from the voice of the lady in the moon (black warrior review)

One of my most favorite journals to read Black Warrior Review invited me to write a craft essay (which ended up being a lyric essay) for my poems “From the Voice of the Lady in the Moon.” The poems are in their latest issue (42.2), from a newer series I am writing based loosely on the Chinese folktale of Chang ‘E. The poems unthread her narrative and have to do with unbuilding a house in order to build it.

Excerpt from the craft essay: "If it is true that every story has a shadow story. If there is always an underbelly to be found. If a woman’s voice is a space that begins boundaried in. If there was something I wanted to speak into the air, the clotted atmosphere, if I thought to myself, The edge of her dress, my fingers in her hair. If it was ruin, and I carried it heavy and spilling in my belly, a breadth too immense for my own. So I wanted to say it to the corner of the room. So I borrowed the shape of her mouth."

And belatedly: Thanks to Paul Hoover for soliciting a couple “Letters to Mao” which you can read online at New American Writing. The issue includes gorgeous work from GC Waldrep, Craig Santos Perez, Barbara Tomash, and classmates Aurelia Cortes Peyron and Maxwell Shanley. It was also lovely to be part of Columbia Poetry Review, where a former student and now friend, Jan-Henry Gray, is an editor. This issue includes three of my image-text poems “How to Build an American Home” from my forthcoming book HOUSE A.

#publications #lyric essay #craft essay #black warrior review #chang 'e #prose poetry #prose poem #new american writing #columbia poetry review #from the voice of the lady in the moon #how to build an american home #letters to mao #house a

my first book!

Happy, over the moon, and grateful: Claudia Rankine (!!!) selected my manuscript, HOUSE A, as winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize! The book will be released in November 2016.

Read some of the poems online at Web Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, and Tarpaulin Sky.

#first book #poetry book #claudia rankine #omnidawn #house A #poetry

dear blank space + how to build an american home

Happy New Year! I spent mine in bed with a terrible flu, so my start to 2016 was: foggy, bleary. But I am proud of this piece "Dear Blank Space: A Literacy Narrative," which closed out the year in Entropy magazine (and was included on LitHub Daily!). It is a lyric essay on the poetics/ethics/politics of blank space; or a meditation on the intersection of my obsessions -- silence, wilderness, unknowability, the margins, and broken things; or how I am grateful to this form for giving me a language. The section “Dear Ruptures” is pretty much a metaphor for how I feel almost all of the time.

I also have 4 image-text poems from my series "How to Build an American Home" in one of my favorites, DIAGRAM. In the series I want to redefine ‘American’ as my own immigrant home, I want to blur the blueprint for what an American Home means.

#publications #lyric essay #entropy magazine #diagram #how to build an american home #dear blank space #lithubdaily

pushcart prize nominations

I'm really happy that "Velella" in The Volta and "Octopus Teeth" in The Normal School were both nominated for a Pushcart Prize! I love both these journals, and I am extremely grateful to the editors for their support. It is nice to have moments of affirmation once in a while :}

#pushcart prize #the volta #the normal school

names for homesickness; etc.

Missing this home very much at the moment. Trying to find the technical vocabulary for the geographical region and vegetation, all I can distill from the surrounding context is: subtropical broad-leafed forests, low-lying woodlands, shrublands, grasslands.

My gathering tendencies...

{ laurels, beeches, & oaks, magnolias & witch-hazels, ericales (it has a milky sap) & myrtles // japanese bay trees (persea), short-flowered machilus (短花楠), cekiang machilus (長序潤楠), cinnamon trees, 木荷, 罗浮栲, japanese camellia kissi, cleyera, magnolia fordiana (龙楠树), chinese banyan, chinese laurel (salamander tree, currant tree), 黄桐, 九节, agarwood, rose apple, javawood, hong kong abacus plant,camphor trees, rose myrtle, baeckea, fried egg plant (egg flower), oblong-leaf litsea, india hawthorn, red melastome, embelia vine, chinese sweetspire, 降真香, ivy tree, chinese sumac, yellow cow wood }

In belated news: A September poem "Velella" at The Volta. There are whales in it. Its sister poem “Octopus Teeth” is in an upcoming issue of The Normal School. Both have to do with sea creatures and with oppositions that collapse into one another.

(Also: happenstance convergence that the poem section of The Volta is called They Will Sew the Blue Sail...perfect description for velella ♥︎)

#velella #publications #prose poetry #poetry #the volta #they will sew the blue sail #The Normal School #prose poem #poem

the poetics of translation

[I Am a Deaf Artist Redefining "Sound"]:

"And the second thing I think about is ghost. Because I can't see sound - it's not there."

"As a society, the majority of people hear. And I mirror them. I have to follow what they’re doing. It was not like society gave me a clear, safe place to do whatever I wanted. I had to learn how to integrate to their ways. And the more aware I become of the noises and the norms, the more I play around with that in my artwork."

"Most people who write music have this idea of silence, but they can hear and they use that to define or shape silence, or vice versa. So how can I learn the idea of sound and silence from their perspective? I can’t relate to that. So I’m starting over from scratch with everything. I’m redefining things."

"There’s different ways sound has an impact on the body. Sound doesn’t enter only through the ears."

[Sep 2015] Her work, and the way she talks about it, is really moving to me. It takes courage to redefine terms we have been given, and an artist has the ability to make this transformation beautiful and compelling. There's an interesting relationship between necessity and play; I think this is true for children, for artists, maybe for everyone. We play (with words, colors, sounds, etc.) because we need to understand something in the world, to make it recognizable to our bodies. And of course, again: the mystery of things that the body knows/absorbs...

#christine sun kim

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