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.’”

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Purchase HOUSE A at Omnidawn, UPNE, or Amazon.

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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