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 […]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]