House A
Read excerpts online: Conjunctions, Mid-American Review, New American Writing, The Margins, Tarpaulin Sky, Waxwing, and DIAGRAM (in print: Tin House 61, Ninth Letter 11.2, Cherry Tree 2, Columbia Poetry Review 29).
Read an essay in Catapult on the writing of this book.
Interview in The Conversant:
What does it mean for Mao and Home to be intertwined in such complex and ambiguous ways—for him to be part of the atmosphere, as much as the sounds of an airplane in the sky or sun on a curtain? How do I explain how History is like water in my house, permeating yet impossible to parse or boundary: simultaneously intimate and distant, known and unknown, bulky and infinitesimal? It touches everything yet is slippery and unreliable… Maybe it is a need to summon rather than unravel this elusive and powerful ghost…to announce my sense of identity/home—always partially adrift—to someone who is partly responsible for it and will never actually hear me.
Winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize (Judge: Claudia Rankine)
PEN Hong Kong and Hyphen Magazine “Favorite Books 2016”
“Jennifer S. Cheng’s House A is an exquisite exploration of the ability of diasporic longing to live within a continuous and full life. These tender epistolary prose poems embody the constant sense of dislocation for the immigrant, while redefining affiliation nonetheless. The poems addressed to “Dear Mao” in the first section weave, correct, and redirect. They chronicle in the alphabetically-organized second section, and instruct on “How to Build an American Home” in the third section, in order to make apparent the illusive tone and mood of an upbringing—its porousness relative to history, myth, and location. Not since Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family and Calvino’s Invisible Cities have I encountered such attention to the construction of love and love’s capacity to transform unimagined locations.” —Claudia Rankine
“In Jennifer S. Cheng’s House A the susurration of the tides pull at the posts that make a home, or at least the idea of home. A wound is a dwelling place. The smells of cooking, the sticky warmth of Texas summers, and the blueprints that map the human heart attempt elegies superimposed against the doors of childhood. Cheng deftly juxtaposes the world and the word in an intimate meditation on space and reverie, ultimately understanding that ‘. . . before language, children experience memories as image and sound, which is to say they experience them as poetry.’ House A is radiant.” —Oliver de la Paz
“In Jennifer S. Cheng’s House A we find an intelligence so deep it feels primal, a sensory perception so acute it links us to the phases of the moon, the tidal patterns of the ocean, the movements beneath the earth’s surface, a tremulous upheaval which becomes a kind of knowing. Cheng shows us that this knowing is akin to a child’s—the child beneath the kitchen table, the child attuned not to language, or fact, or even story, but to atmosphere, spinning her web of silken presences at the juncture of the table leg. Family (and history) here is echo, heartbeat, windows and doors being opened, shadow and sunlight on the floors and walls—the texture of being cared for. Cheng’s poems paradoxically, beautifully, become the tools of a super-fine archaeology which unearths the foundations of our (almost) lost dwelling places before language—for in these poems sensation and instinct are at once elemental and as eloquent as the flight of migratory birds. How can it be that the history of a particular American immigrant family takes us to such earthly origins? Well, we have to keep reading Cheng’s poems with their atmospheric disjunctions, their rhetorical precisions that cut into and refine, that scrape back and debride the cells of home building (nest and hive and shell), that take their microscopically thin samplings, in order to find out.” —Barbara Tomash
If you would like a personalized, signed copy, you can purchase from me here. Otherwise, purchase or request a desk copy:
Reviews & Praise
“In her elegiac debut, Cheng...excavates the nostalgic ephemera of the immigrant home. The poems are delicate and dexterous, with Cheng juxtaposing diasporic history with childhood memory. Through eloquent stitching of a childhood dream, she resurrects an estranged home’s haunting air: ‘You were dust in my house. A shadow underneath the floorboards.’ Anchored by the language of dislocation, each poem stands out as a courageous attempt to find what is imagined as home.”
“I read this book obsessively, like I would devour a great thriller or a decadent meal of language... The success of Cheng’s book lies in its ability to render those ephemeral moments that exist solely in the negative space of what remains unsaid.”
“Between the oscillations and waves of the tidal tongue that are the poems of Cheng’s first book...we are asked to interrogate with her these fragments of dissolving sound, feeling, and memory, these “brief lingering notes” with “such residue” from our collective and private “phantom limb.” Cheng studies the volatile meteorology between distance and absence, the echo dividing “into lights and breaks,” and all that haunts our and our poet’s “landscape of embodied history.””
“Composed of three sections, each written in a different form, House A reconstructs this childlike experience of the world by blending the literal and metaphorical ways in which we build our houses and our selves.”
“House A is a three-part constellation of poems and tiny lyric essays about dislocation, diaspora, and how the undercurrents of history wind through our ideas of identity and home.”
“A triptych of lyric essays...comprising smaller lyrics essays so distilled and pluralistic they’re more lyric than essay. House A inherits many tropes from the essay, especially its more formal, intellectual rhetoric, but the writing’s movement is more liquid, more ruminative...more like the immigrant’s decentered network... Just like Cheng’s concept of home, the essay is a structure too rigid to house her experience, but one that has defined it nonetheless. It’s an institution to be cherished and subverted, sometimes in the same breath.”
— DIAGRAM
“House A is an eye-opening debut about placing one’s longing and displacement at contemporary times... Cheng is a gifted writer unafraid of confronting the limits of poetics.”
“Here the lyric becomes a performance of what has been lost, becomes elegy, and finally, becomes an impossibility… Cheng upholds the possibility of compassion and connection, even in a divisive, sometimes hostile cultural landscape. Although the speaker’s ‘homeland’ is described as an ‘ambiguity,’ and the recipient of this deeply personal letter is a mere “symbol,” both are still held ‘close to the heart.’ Fittingly, the voice of empire never speaks back, but, rather, becomes a conduit for ‘the biography of the collective,’ a ‘spreading of constellations across a dark chart.’
“The poems in House A...[tell] truths about distance, belonging, and home, but they do so in what Cheng calls “refracted” ways—i.e., ways that combine the straightforward and obscure, the verbal and non-verbal, the ambiguous and silent.”
“This impressive debut collection...astounds as a gentle, intelligent meditation on the primal longing for anchoring, especially in those who have been displaced or have inherited the displacement of previous generations. Cheng’s poems delight in the melding of spaces, subjects, the tangible and the intangible, to reflect the fluidity of existence for people who cannot easily lay claim to a home.”
excerpt: “Letters to Mao”
Dear Mao,
Behind the fog, the lake is like a well-worn sheet gathered at the edges. What does it mean, my father as a child believing he would have to lie his body still at the bottom of a boat? Dear Mao: I used to be the kind of person who accepts things as they are: ciphers hidden in the lotus cakes, lanterns set to sea in order to lure the body home, rice bundles to keep the fish from eating holes in a drowned body’s limbs. Our home in the south of the island slept between the ocean on one side, and on the other large dark hills, so I could always know what it was to be at the same time cocooned and ready to arch a distance. How I would brush my teeth in the darkness, afraid of the shadow at the window but comforted by the slopes I knew were lurking behind. Dear Mao: I never wanted my mother’s body too far from my own.