HOUSE A reflections: readings, reviews, interviews
I don’t know what it means that I am posting a reflection about my first book publication after the launch of my second book. My enneagram is Type 4, and one of the descriptions says that I tend to linger in “preparing” mode because I never feel ready. In any case, as I was planning for the release of my book MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems earlier this summer, I spent time reflecting back on HOUSE A. I tend to get lost in all the ways fear and insecurity set me back, so I would like to carve out a space to appreciate the bright moments.
Readings:
I was uncertain about putting together readings, but I ended up visiting six cities, because others reached out, because my own efforts. At my book launch, I read while projections of the ocean and geometric images shifted behind me. Other memorable events: Poets House in NYC with Omnidawn poets; Open Books in Seattle with Kaveh Ackbar and Paige Lewis (whose poetry I am enamored with), and California Institute for Integral Studies (I really enjoyed the “conversation” portion with the moderator and audience). Most of all, I loved visiting classes, wandering together with students into the mysterious terrain of poetry and writing. The students were especially incisive readers, thoughtful and curious, wrestling with the same questions that I do.
Reviews:
An accumulation of book reviews for House A: Publishers Weekly, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, PEN HK, DIAGRAM and others. So many of these are in themselves essays that are beautiful and pleasurable to read. I did not anticipate what a gift it would be to feel so seen by strangers. I did not know how moving it would be to have a person read my words with deliberate care and thought, making their own connections, bringing their experiences and methods of navigating into its light.
The reviews describe and analyze my book: in light of the impossibility, infinity, and intimacy of lyric address (LARB); as a triptych of lyric essays comprising smaller lyric essays, an immigrant’s decentering of boundaries in both home and literary form (DIAGRAM); in terms of my own critical work into refractive/marginal poetics (Massachusetts Review); with the words “trembling” and “oscillating” and “tidal tongue” (Columbia Poetry Review). It was also special to be featured in the May/June 2017 issue of the Brown Alumni Magazine.
Interviews:
I loved engaging in interviews, being in conversation, thinking about my own writing process from a different location. I spent the most time on The Conversant. The one in the Rumpus felt vulnerable, discussing the current political context and its implications for poetry. And the one with Vi Khi Nao in the Los Angeles Review of Books blog was a little terrifying because it was conducted textually in real time in a Google doc.