#overpour

[christineshanshanhou]

overpour | 04.27.24

[sinetheta]

My mother cuts the legs off a moving crab. The legs curl in a bucket washed to garbage to sea. When I come home, I tread water on the carpet and hang my head low. Guillotine of the heart, the wind causes trouble between two trees.

“Breaker-of-Trees” by Jane Wong. 2014.

Jane Wong is the author of OVERPOUR, a collection of poems spanning the disparate, scholarly, and grotesque. Employing themes that unite the narrative and biographical, the futuristic and familial, Wong writes in a style that is luridly simple, yet constellating and frenetic. She focuses on sensations and memories, as highlighted in her TEDx talk. Wong is a former U.S. Fulbright Fellow and Kundiman Fellow, and her works have been published in multiple individual chapbooks and in national anthologies. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.

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[lifeinpoetry]

It is early and I have no one to trust. The sun wrestles wildly about me, throwing light in unbearable places.

Jane Wong, from “The Act of Killing,” Overpour

[lifeinpoetry]

I want everything to spring up from the ground: grace, forgiveness. I want the sun to stop following me, to file a restraining order against the spiny beast.

— Jane Wong, from “Pastoral Power,” Overpour

[umichfan]

When someone at #starbucks orders an #overpour & you have to make it because the starbucks person doesn't know how (Eboni) this is the extra #coffee

[veldy]

Nothing but class at my house ;) #wine #chardonnay #chianti #overpour (at Coon Rapids, Minnesota)

[actionbookspress]

“Jane Wong’s powerful first book weaves together seemingly disparate topics such as war and child’s play, language and exile, debt, animals and nature. By doing so, Wong creates a space between—for the reader to enter. At the same time, by creating this space, she makes a space for possibility… Montage-like, the poems are also a kind of philosophy by which I mean they are curious. They ask questions of the world. Not afraid of being earnest, Wong’s voice is both playful and cerebral, weaving in and out of the world—its wars and its violence, poverty and alienation—making a beautiful and smart, strange and new, word elixir.” –Cynthia Cruz NOW AVAILABLE