Lyric Essay
“A Catalogue of Falling Things.” The Iowa Review. Forthcoming.
Runner-up, 2023 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction.
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“We Bury What We Cannot Bear to Lose.” Gulf Coast. Winter/Spring 2023.
“It is a wonder how continuously we choose not to crush the fragile seashell in our hand, salty from the sea; not to keep the steering wheel straight at the curve of a highway bridge; not to continue wading, wandering far beyond, beyond the shoreline. At some point or another, we discover life is not a series of choices; the only choice we ever really make is one of here, over and over, like a forgotten metronome, until even this choice eludes us.”
“we participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.” So We Can Know: writers of color on pregnancy, loss, abortion, and birth, ed. aracelis girmay. Haymarket Books, 2023.
“The hour my baby was born, the world readjusted itself. I thought love was supposed to be immediate and innate, but instead it wandered slowly, blurry, the way day turns into night, light in a house gradually losing itself to something less bright. The hour my baby was born, the world collapsed in on itself. I could not catch it in my hands. It swept away from me like a violent earthquake or continent swallowed into sea. I did not love the world but dreaded it. It terrified me, like falling into the inside of a dark mouth.”
“Toward a Poetics of Phantom Limb, Or All the Shadows that Carry Us” (multimodal essay). Territory. Mar 2017.
Reprinted in: The Lyric Essay as Resistance: truth from the margins, ed. Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold. Wayne State University Press, 2023.
“Dear Blank Space: A Literacy Narrative.” Republished in Lit Hub, 2022. Originally appeared in Entropy, Dec 31, 2015.
Featured in LitHub Daily.
Top 15 most read essays on Entropy in 2016.Excerpted in: The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit, ed. Leah Silvieus & Lee Herrick. Orison Books, 2020.
“If the world is a thing that cannot be spoken whole, then let me stay a little bit broken, a relief to acknowledge this pile of occluded things.”
“Sometimes, the closest sense of wholeness comes from holding the pieces loosely. Perhaps the failure, and beauty, of language, the world, is this: that meaning is found in its recesses.”
“The Body, the { } Again” (excerpts). A Velvet Giant. Sep 2022.
Nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
“What is true: to speak of the body is an attempt to speak of everything beyond it. The body is a fact; everything else is unpinpointable.”
“What the Midwest Was Like.” The Common. Nov 17, 2021.
“In the Midwest, the wind carried the smell of nearby farmland, and the air was filled with tiny insects. We were quiet as we drove on into town, amidst drab streets and overcast buildings. In the Midwest, small, winged bugs kept flying into my eyelashes; I could feel them when I blinked.”
Craft Essay for “From the Voice of the Lady in the Moon.” Black Warrior Review. 2016.
“Her voice is the rhythm of sleepwalking. In sleep we are no better than animals. In sleep the moon is a magnet that regulates our breath. A body that sleepwalks sheds as much as it collects: pathways, murmurings, attempts of the appendages.”
“in between such shadows.” Cherry Tree. 2016.
Listen to an excerpt at The Stump.
“Bodily veins run from cheekbones to ankles in the manner of road maps. When you emerge out of the womb, the translucent strand of bundled vessels is clamped and cut. How we each mark our entrance into the world: a broken line—”
“A Poetics of Iteration.” Poor Claudia. June 2015.
“Instead, I began with a haunting. Every night, a return. To keep time by lunar light is to iterate in the ebb and flow of shadows. Iteration: the repetition of a process or utterance. In other words: the earth’s orbit, the sun rising and setting, the annular return of springtime peonies.”
“In the end there were only objects: wooden chair where I stacked my books, jars gathered in front of the window, a trio of random pictures I printed and stuck to the wall—as though such blitheness, blotted in the corners where the ink had run, might counter some inexplicable and suffocating weight. I wrote down phrases like book of shut and cultural muteness, like a creature in the ocean clicking haphazardly, unsure of what it is sounding for. Increasingly in those years I held the image of water in my mind: the invisible pressure, the sudden self-consciousness of a body submerged, a deep and impressionable and stunning silence. [...] Hikikomori: bird-star, with hard-edged point and soft-winged flutter.”
“Umbrella Poetics.” Drunken Boat. 2015.
Reprinted in Hong Kong 20/20: reflections on a borrowed place, ed. PEN Hong Kong. Blacksmith Books, 2017.
“The facts and the news media would never tell me what I needed to know: What shape did the shadows cast on their bodies when they raised instruments meant to keep the weather out, in protection against a governmental force that was coming down on them?”
“Notes on the Body in Turmoil.” Sonora Review. 2014.
“Synonyms for text: body, content, context, extract, idea, material, paragraph, passage, stanza, story, verse, words. According to this, I can say that my text aches every Sunday morning as I wake to your sound, which I hear vaguely like a hollowed out fever in my head as I dress, and that the text of life is morsels, bread, watery sleep—and maybe grace, which is a synonym for love.”
“Children of Light.” Quarterly West. Winter 2013.
Finalist in Black Warrior Review's Eighth Annual Nonfiction Contest.
“When the idea first arose that Gentiles could have a relationship with the God of Moses, there was a surge of opposition and protest. Men were beaten, stoned, driven out of cities. Some were arrested, brought to court, or killed, all for the sake of keeping the community of God clean and pure. [...] Luther was a man of bad tempers. I like red shoes. And the woman who had led a sinful life brought an alabaster jar of perfume.”
“Midnight.” The Collagist. Jan 2010.
“Sun: We sit on little stumps and break the vegetable leafs with our fingers. The same motions I have made before. A constant, pressing verb, rather than background noise. Body: Our guide rides his moped into town with his pregnant wife and knocks on doors to ask for shelter. The doctor we are traveling with sweats slowly, carefully. A month later, I wear oversized blue glasses in an air-conditioned room to see the moon’s layers on a large white screen. In grayscale: the man falls over and you can almost make out the particles.”
“Two Parallel Motions: Mapping Hong Kong.” Fifty-Fifty: An Anthology of New Hong Kong Writing, ed. Xu Xi. Hong Kong: Haven Books, 2008.
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“The Body in Turmoil.” Seneca Review. Fall 2005.
“When two bodies of water meet, if one is colder and saltier than the other, there is a sinking effect so that one body falls through the murky depths of voiceless noise beneath the other. When two bodies of land meet, they can be considered as one massive body of land. A body of water, whether thrashing or still, separates two bodies of land.”
“Mother Tongue.” Prospect: An Anthology of Creative Nonfiction. Spring 2004.
“Chinese elastic and hopscotch are popular games among schoolgirls. The city of Shanghai is struggling to keep up with its growing population. It is the early years of the Maoist Era [...] ...my grandmother takes three of her daughters, including my mother, across the waters to Taiwan, leaving behind one daughter who will never forget. Take your bitterness to the grave, Sister Three. My mother attends a girls' school where she sweeps the floor and listens to a teacher's hatred against the Japanese (see Nanjing Massacre). They eat rice porridge every day, and once, my mother accidentally gives a bad pork bun to a dog on the street, which will cause it to have severe diarrhea.”