Review: Michelle Naka Pierce’s CONTINUOUS FRIEZE BORDERING RED

I love Michelle Naka Pierce’s Continuous Frieze Bordering Red. I live inside this book.

///Continuous Frieze Bordering Red succeeds because it takes a two-dimensional visual catalyst (Rothko’s murals) and concentrates on the spatial quality and physicality of the brushstroke, as well as the ways in which the canvases install themselves in a room. It uses this knowledge as a framework for imagining the entrapped/migratory location of the hybrid/mixed race body as it exists in an ever-increasingly benign/brutal police state and allegedly “post-racial” landscape.///

Read more at Lantern Review.

Review: Tan Lin’s INSOMNIA AND THE AUNT

Live at Lantern Review <<< Tan Lin’s Insomnia and the Aunt glows neon yellow—like hilighters, French fries, hot mustard packets from Panda Express, or a Waffle House of scallion pancake-flavored commercial. In this remote control scrapbook Lin grieves the death of his estranged, mixed race aunt, who owned a motel in the middle of nowhere and watched a lot of TV. Tucked among postcards, a photograph of Ronald Reagan bottle-feeding a chimpanzee and footnoted Google reverse searches, Lin tries to extract ghosts from cached pages and remember his aunt’s eyes in the white noise and signal snow of “the Asian American immigrant experience,” which is really just America being watched on TV. >>> Read more at Lantern Review.

Review: Bhanu Kapil’s SCHIZOPHRENE

My review of Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene is live at Lantern Review. Schizophrenia, im/migration and the texture of fragmentation.

Review: Marjorie Stein’s AN ATLAS OF LOST CAUSES

Thanks to Mg Roberts, I had the pleasure of reviewing Marjorie Stein’s An Atlas of Lost Causes (Kelsey Street Press, 2011), which is up now in Issue 19 of Word For/Word. Hypnotic, investigative prose poetics—a twin sister, a crime, a pinhole camera, a smoking gun.

Review: Pamela Lu’s AMBIENT PARKING LOT

Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot is the best book I read in 2011! Read my review at Lantern Review and you’ll find a bunch of reasons to get your hands on this brilliant book. A mediocre band of ambient noise musicians? Deadpan hilarity? Mockumentary? Death of an Automotive Dancer? See, I told you so.

Review: j/j hastain’s LONG PAST THE PRESENCE OF COMMON

long past the presence of common

perhaps I could rant better if a pronoun felt safer for me (77)

j/j hastain’s long past the presence of common (Say it With Stones, 2011) contemplates infinity, dark matter, pronouns, fucking, non-linear flesh and how a “cyborgian gender” could “become body.” Both hastain and I studied at Naropa University during the same time, and I can sense in this book residual resonances with kari edwards (NO GENDER) and Bhanu Kapil in the book’s soundings and saturations. This project is, as hastain writes, a “yearning to become a quantum gesture” and a “brutal somatic effort at materializations of flesh by way of non-linear narrative.”

Language in this book tears through skin and cloud “[a]s an ethereal angel trying to tear through the human realms.” The book grounds itself through interspersed, prosaic scenes and text and image collages, which create supplementary visual layers. (See some of these collages in PANK.) In the filmic scenes, a “viewer’s” perspective allows the reader to span/scan/pan into a future world in which the grafting of a cyborgian skin is required in order to survive a glacial climate.

hastain investigates how bio matter could attain sentience and become material, whether sense alone can have form—how to embody without “body.” In hastain’s stitching and threading, I ask myself: Is gender the body? Or is gender that sentient goo moving within us? hastain asks, “is there a gender to these words? / or to their wounds?”

For humans who do not fit into either-or models, dominant culture’s structures do no provide us space. I want to speak deeply and authentically of the dilemmas of difference—of being categorically considered the ‘opposite’ or the ‘other’ in polarist systems—of the damage that this can do to pulsating, mixed, cyborg entities (of which I am). [...]

As a reaction to breakage…it is possible to increase breakage. I am saying that we can add wave to wave.

I have learned…that one can actually go so far into the dis of any seeming dislocation, that we become a new kind of located [...] this embodied dis [...] I am aware that you can die at the moment of dis. You can stop. But if instead, you decide to breed continuance in yourself, that is the beginning of being uncolonizable and unownable. (53-4)

I think about how physical and psychological wounds embedded in the bodies of queer, trans, intersex and gender non-conforming folks are the result of duality’s damage, and how these wounds show the startling pulse of sex and gender in cells and fluids. To heal, to become whole, to continue, hastain proposes a linkage, hinge or merge with “our own accessible beyond,” to inhabit a future body, to “turn all exiles into eclipses.”

The way hastain inscribes the multiplicity and transformative power of queer sex conjures to mind Octavia Butler’s ooloi and a hybrid futurity in which DNA helixes, intimacy and communication have a shared intelligence—”we become … every country    ever corpuscle genre” “peeling the body / as one would an / edible / audible / silhouette.” Through continuance inside the “embodied dis,” through binding, bondage and Tatsumi Hijikata‘s weakened body butoh, hastain posits a presence “long past.”

this is the pronoun for liquid and lipid [...] / our enjoin is the offered pronoun / for the development / of new entireties

Review: Jenny Boully’s “not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them”

My review of Jenny Boully’s not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them is live at Lantern Review! Jenny Boully and I share Thai mothers and the same alma mater. I am thrilled and honored to engage this fierce-weird feminist remix of Peter Pan–you’re going to want to read this book! Thanks to editor Iris Law and the folks at Tarpaulin Sky Press!

Review: Kim Koga’s LIGATURE STRAIN and Margaret Rhee’s YELLOW / YELLOW

My review of Kim Koga’s Ligature Strain and Margaret Rhee’s Yellow / Yellow is now live at Lantern Review! I engage Cunt-Ups, Yellow Apparel, index cuts and typography to celebrate these fiercely feminist chapbooks recently published by Tinfish Press’ Retro Series!

AALR’s Special Issue on 9/11 and My People Film Series

My review of The Asian American Literary Review’s Special Issue Commemorating the Tenth Anniversary of Sept. 11 is now live at Lantern Review here!

Also, my short films Tom/Trans/Thai and TomboiGatoeyMango Episodes 1 & 2 will be screened as part of the Kelly Strayhorn Theater’s 3rd Annual My People (queer people of color) Film Series in Pittsburgh, PA on November 8! View the schedule here! Many thanks to Soham Patel, Colleen Jankovic and Joseph Hall! I’ll be Skyping with the audience live from the Djerassi residency! Fellow Hollins University alumni Jillian Peña’s work will be shown as well!

Lantern Review Staff Writers 2011-2012

I am excited to announce that I will be joining the Lantern Review team as a book reviewer for 2011-2012! Read more about the amazing staff here! Many thanks to Iris A. Law and Mia Ayumi Malhotra! First review coming soon!

Review of Ronaldo V. Wilson’s “Poems of the Black Object” at Galatea Resurrects #14

My review of Ronaldo V. Wilson’s Poems of the Black Object is ALIVE at Galatea Resurrects #14. Thanks to Eileen Tabios!