We wake in the middle of a life, hungry.
We smear durian along our mouths, sing soft
death a lullaby. Carcass breath, eros of licked fingers
and the finest perfume.
What is love if not rot?
After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly by Jane Wong. 2018.
Jane Wong is a poet and professor currently based in Tacoma, Washington, USA. A former U.S. Fullbright Fellow and Kundiman Fellow, their poems have appeared in journals such as Pleidas, The Volta, Third Coast, as well as featuring in The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral. Wong has published three chapbooks and published her first collection of poetry, OVERPOUR, in 2016.
In After Preparing the Alter, Wong continues to articulate her interest in the concept of “haunting” in Asian American poetry. She considers the ways in which history impacts the work of Asian American poetry and thus how “language acts as a haunting space of interventionism and activism”. In invoking the image of the hungry ghost (餓鬼), Wong interrogates the bounds of corporeality and its ramifications for Asian and Asian American identity through the medium of food.
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