“I wanted to turn to actual living language—and reveal, through poetry, the contradictions or erasures or sometimes comic possibilities imposed by different texts.”

Poets Jane Wong, Carlina Duan, Christine Shan Shan Hou, and Muriel Leung explore the ways histories impact the work of Asian American writing across time and space.

I was her American / daughter, my tongue / my hardest muscle / forced to swallow / a muddy alphabet.

How does history – particularly the history of war, colonialism, and marginalization – impact the work of Asian American poets across time and space? How does language act as a haunting space of intervention and activism? Poet and scholar Jane Wong raised these questions with her digital multimedia project, The Poetics of Haunting. For the […]