Interview in HTMLGIANT:

In this project I wanted for silence to be a part of the rhythm, and for the words and images to have a slower, measured quality, so it felt right to surround them in some kind of silent space. The placement of text mattered to me as well…the rhythm, the “pitch” of the text, the sense of words floating or hanging or settling or being cocooned. I tried to approach it intuitively and purposefully, treating the white space similarly to the way I approached the images, as part of the “narrative.”

Finalist, 2010 NMP/DIAGRAM Chapbook Contest

“To be unable to speak, to be shy, to be quiet, to be reticent, is not to be silent, or silenced--not if one listens carefully to the state of reclusion, as carefully as Jennifer S. Cheng does in her beautiful essay, in which she invokes not only the resonance of such a state, but reminds us, too, that the vocation of writing--always--is a call from within. It is a call she has clearly heard.” —Mary Ruefle

“In her concise, precise and beautifully rendered Invocation, Cheng’s ‘utterances’ are urgent and even, at times, defiant. She puzzles out existence, investigates silence. The intersection of images and words teases yet insists: you will pay attention, you will comprehend. This voicing of the voiceless is stunningly magical.” —Xu Xi

“Invocation opens with a picture: the verso of a book…with nine profiles of the head and neck, each illustrating the tongue's position and the throat's opening as the speaker produces sound… Cheng oscillates between binarizing body and voice, and underscoring that they are one… Invocation is the script of a soliloquy, a monologue never voiced.” —Lindsey Drager, The Collagist

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