Throughout the collection New York City reflects a unique landscape of loss, a space as full of grief as it is of everyday life, scientific facts, memory, motherhood, healing, love, and hope.
While many Californians are obsessed with “living in the moment,” most Asian Americans I know live in a complex cultural space where “the moment” is the superstructure and history is the base.
His arm jerked. Every time I spoke, it happened. I wanted it to stop. I didn’t want it to stop. I kept looking up. I didn’t feel my son’s presence in his body anymore, but his body was all I could reach of him.
If she just wrote about her own life, perhaps she could produce something that rivals Portrait of a Lady. Yet none of the books she reads are actually written by women.
An excerpt from The Rumpus Poetry Book Club‘s September selection, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency by Chen Chen forthcoming from BOA Editions on September 13, 2022 Subscribe by…
Language is inexact, and will always be an approximation. In my own experience of amnesia, there was a period of time where things didn't have names, and it was in that nameless, getting-to-know-something that I felt I knew it better.
There is this moment where you must first cut yourself off from doing more research because that rabbit trail goes on forever in some cases . . . You have to ask yourself, “Do I have enough?”