Author Reading – Jennifer S. Cheng w/ Jennifer Tseng
Tuesday, May 8 @ 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm
Presented by Papercuts:
About MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems (2018), selected by Bhanu Kapil as winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards:
Mixing fable and fact, extraordinary and ordinary, Jennifer S. Cheng’s hybrid collection, MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems, explores the feminine monstrous as it draws on various Chinese mythologies about women, particularly that of Chang’E (the Lady in the Moon), uncovering the shadow stories of our myths — with the belief that there is always an underbelly. MOON explores bewilderment and shelter, destruction and construction, unthreading as it rethreads, shedding as it collects.
“What are the secret aspects of a book, which cannot be spoken of and that unfold in ways that nobody can describe to us in advance? In a world where ‘boundaries are slipping,’ what modes of metamorphosis now become possible? Can radical change be read as a ‘map of the body in motion’? I am interested in Cheng’s idea of story as the place where we come to ‘forget something, as much as remember.’ This is a formulation that precipitates the artifacts and deities of the book: ‘the logic of dust cloud, spiral.’ Everything that’s left behind. If reading is a form of pilgrimage, then Cheng gives us its charnel ground events, animal conversions, guiding figures and elemental life. ‘I want to mark a new map for a body opening,’ she writes, and then she does.” —Bhanu Kapil
“…What distinguishes this study of the Self in proximity to Other and to the World is the way Cheng refuses to tell stories and instead, insists on asking them. With curiosity and attention, MOON shines its light on inquiry as art, asking as making. In the tradition of Fanny Howe’s poetics of bewilderment, Cheng gives us a poetics of possibility.” —Jennifer Tseng
“Cheng’s newest poetry collection bravely tests language and the beautiful boundaries of body and geography. This is a rare poet whose elegant poems create a lovely convergence of geometries and mythologies into something akin to ‘an ocean fever to break between…teeth.’ The assembly of ‘insect script’ in these worlds where ‘the sky becomes a chilled pomelo’ makes for a rich and deeply satisfying read.” —Aimee Nezhukumatathil
JENNIFER S. CHENG writes poetry and lyric essay. Her debut book, HOUSE A, was selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize, and she is the author of the forthcoming hybrid collection MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems, selected by Bhanu Kapil as winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize, and Invocation: an Essay, an image-text chapbook published by New Michigan Press. Her writing appears in Tin House, Conjunctions, AGNI, The Literary Hub, Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, The Normal School, Guernica, Hong Kong 20/20 (a PEN HK anthology), and elsewhere. She was a Fulbright Scholar and received fellowships and awards from Brown University, the University of Iowa, San Francisco State University, Bread Loaf, Kundiman, and the Academy of American Poets. Having grown up in Texas, Connecticut, and Hong Kong, she lives in San Francisco.
Poet and fiction writer JENNIFER TSENG was born in Indiana and raised in California by a first generation Chinese engineer and a third generation German American microbiologist. Her first book The Man With My Face (AAWW 2005) won the 2005 Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s National Poetry Manuscript Competition and a 2006 PEN American Center Open Book Award. Her second book Red Flower, White Flower (Marick Press 2013), winner of the Marick Press Poetry Prize, features Chinese translations by Mengying Han and Aaron Crippen, and her novel Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (Europa Editions 2015) was a finalist for the PEN Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and for the New England Book Award. MAYUMI is available in English, Italian, and Danish.