on the essay “This is an impossible communication: but that’s the only kind we want.” “The Voyager Golden Record is the furthest edge of longing.” “This is not a desperate experiment, or an essay ‘about’ desperation. It is in no way ‘loose’—we are simply looking for ‘the one.’” “An essay is a kind of powerlessness. […]
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updates/news An art piece “Palimpsest” is part of the digital exhibit on immigration at the Wing Luke Museum. The collages are an exploration of dislocation as an embodied experience for immigrants and children of immigrants: the distance between past and future, the relationship between body and landscape, and the simultaneous erasure and rewriting of histories. […]
joshua tree national park; secret gardens July 2014: desert birthday * And more, more notes on bewilderment: “To engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing” “The language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation” “While there are many Woolfs, mine has been a Virgil guiding me through the […]
updates/news “Cartography” is up at Tupelo Quarterly and was a finalist in the TQ5 Poetry Contest. The poem came out of my Fulbright year in Hong Kong. Also: This Saturday I will be reading at Litcrawl in the second phase (7:15) @ Lost Weekend Video with lovely Kundiman poets.
hk protests
Heartaches. NYTimes: “Crackdown on Protests” Live feed on Reddit #OccupyHK * [Oct 4] Earlier in the week I wrote something about HK, it’s in The Rumpus. Doesn’t articulate everything I am trying to sort out, but it is a piece of it. [Oct 16] “Umbrella/Shield Poetics”: more processing on the HK protests at the Kundiman […]
notes
For example: “Class struggle” is codified differently within particular historical/cultural contexts. In China, or among those who left (escaped) during the Cultural Revolution, it means Mao and the Red Guards, a corrupt government, a widespread trauma. As a child, “Communism” was only ever a terrible Evil, and it was a surprise when I got to […]
中秋節 Happy mooncake day! Mine was spent on a national seashore in a tent.
hello hello: tin house
Two “Letters to Mao” are in the newest issue of Tin House. Especially tickled to be paperbound with hero Roxane Gay.
{secret} gardens
“It has something to do with preserving life’s mystery; with leaving certain things undescribed, unspecified, and unknown; with savoring certain emotions… It depends on an intensified sense of life’s preciousness and fragility” “Each of us has a certain resolute innerness—a kernel of selfhood that we can’t share with others… There can be something enjoyable, even […]
in the meantime . . There was Taiwan, and there was the desert, and there was hermiting and home-tending, and thoughts on sacred spaces of solitude, of leaving things unarticulated. [beehive cottage]