Upcoming Readings

March 1, 2014
6 p.m. - 12 a.m.
From the Convergence Zone
Sole Repair Shop
Seattle, WA

March 26, 2014
6 p.m.
APRIL Festival
Location TBD
Seattle, WA

May 14, 2014
7 p.m.
Beacon Bards @ The Station
Seattle, WA

the city's newfangled
digital kiosks mirror slashes
to public bus routes

drops of dew on bare
maple at dawn shine bright
as white xmas lights

after feasting on the gluten-
free meal, I spy my husband
scarf down a scone

I am reading at the Wing Luke Asian Museum on Thursday, December 5, at 6 p.m. If you live in the Seattle area, please come! Book signing will follow the reading.

rituals

as a wedding gift I was given
a book of Tibetan wisdom
a single epigraph for each day
of the year, to offset an image
of Buddhist Shangri-La

when my father visits he scans
through the volume for the pictures,
skipping over words; when I walk
past it’s no longer October 13th
a month out from my son’s birth

dog-eared to a page of street
children marking March &
the winter chill, I restore
the calendar back to today’s date
return to find the book opened

to a spread of Himalayan
mountains, my father moving
backwards, resists time

future POTUS

when I tell my father
Tomo was born w/ the caul,
he’s sure the boy is destined
for greatness, future leader
of the free world, my father has never
voted in a domestic election
though he lays claim to shaking
hands w/ Ronald Reagan
once in an elevator in the 1990s
after the Gipper’s term is up
before dementia sets in
at five, my father had already
instilled in my brother how
he would be a doctor; my path
writ as lawyer – I parroted
this profession to all who asked
what do you want to be when you grow up
not yet knowing law the meaning
of calling, the power of speech

Maternity Haiku

someone's spouse passes out
while the women watch slides
of birth by c-section

*

just shy of thirty-five
weeks, tsukimi chakai - I gaze
at the ripening moon

Ballard News Tribune Press for AUX ARCS

Profiled in the Ballard News Tribune.

Upcoming....

I'll be reading next week at the Ballard Public Library from 6-8 pm with three other poets for the It's About Time series.

Press for AUX ARCS in The Stranger

Paul Constant reviews AUX ARCS at The Stranger.

Profile at Seattle Wrote

Thanks to Norelle Done for featuring me on Seattle Wrote.

Press for AUX ARCS

The Poetry Foundation blog, Harriet, has a posting on AUX ARCS today, highlighting an interview that I did with Rauan Klassnik.

The full interview is here at HTML Giant.

I am also the featured author of the month at Crowd the Book, a project run by a couple of old classmates from Naropa.

City Arts Magazine also profiles my work.

New Book

I have a new book of poems and photographs that published on July 1 from La Alameda Press, the publishers of my first full-length collection Equivalence, which came out 10 years ago.

Read more about AUX ARCS here:

Asian American Literature Fans
NW Asian Weekly
Jesus Jazz Buddhism

Listen to a public radio piece for New Letters on the Air on my recent work, here.

Order AUX ARCS from SPD, or for a signed personalized copy, email me.

swishing the toilets,
cleaning the house, readying
the mind to write

game show's lone female
hopeful buzzes in the answer
first: what is the glass ceiling

this weather can't
make up it's mind - fleece tights
one day, bare legs the next

cursing the worm in
my storebought basil, those black
specks unhatched eggs or poops?

Yesterday's haiku

staying silent towards
the woman crowding my space
about the cream cheese on her beak

*

no. 17, morning commute:
watching a woman apply her eyes
lips skin and cheeks

A new poem on the Tadao Ando Gallery in the Art Institute of Chicago to accompany my ongoing "Gathering at the Orchid Pavilion series"...

Installation No. 16

jomon jars replaced by plastic
mannequins, wanting definition
vacant body forms, scaffolding

to bear the float of haute
couture, Japanese fashion
Rei Kawakubo’s slip:

“lumps & bumps” – a garment
of transposable parts, butt pads
shift to chest or hips

bee-stung knees, or a weight-
lifter’s muscular back; shoulders
like Tilda Swinton

the site-specific video install
lights up Ando’s towers like
a fashion expo, visitors

careening down a catwalk
of columns, the space between
pillars, a stage for self-portraits

in silhouette, geometric slants
echo frames of denuded
posts, a scroll of light

unfurled against a wall
the artist’s projection
a measured pattern

of movable parts

after the clash, seeing
him gaze out the window as if
waiting for me to return home

*

flowering bush w/
half its petals on the ground
like a haircut gone amok

April haiku

eyeing the leftovers
in the kitchen, after a bout
w/ food poisoning

*

driving past a pool of blood
spreading across the sidewalk,
the bus driver twitches

*

runaway roll of gauze
left behind at the stabbing
scene yellow police tape

The Next Big Thing (TNBT)

Thanks to poet and yogini Sara Nolan for tagging me.

What is/was the working title of the book(s)?

Aux Arcs.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

The idea for Aux Arcs crystallized in my mind as I was crossing the border from Arkansas into Missouri on my cross-country move back to Seattle, after three years living in isolation in small Southern towns throughout Texas and Arkansas. I had been working on a collection of poems during my time living in the South, but had not been able to see the larger structure of how to interweave the themes and works together into a sequence. As my husband and I passed beyond Fayetteville, I began to see signs for “Aux Arcs” which made me think of the Ozarks mountain range that I had never seen during our two years living in Central Ark. I began to think of Zen metaphors about mountains – how the mountain comes in and out of focus. The mountain vanishes entirely. And so does the hermit that lives on it. I had never felt at one with the South while living there, because of the nature of some of highly racialized experiences that I had while living in Conway and San Marcos. I did not allow myself to write about them, because I had to live within that reality from day-to-day. I had to have a good cover story and narrative to make sense of the strangeness that I had chosen. In leaving the South permanently, I became one with the metaphoric mountain and felt myself returning.

“Aux Arcs” is the old French term to communicate things “of and from Arkansas.” It also signifies a bend in the river. My time living in the Deep South was a significant detour from the life that I had begun to build in the Pacific Northwest. So the book is representative of a space or geography, and of an arc in my experiences which was rich and complex, confusing, difficult, full of strange discoveries, and ultimately liberating.

What genre does your book(s) fall under?

Aux Arcs, as it is currently being conceived and designed is a hybrid book. Primarily poetry (including some visual/concrete works and prose poems), the book will also include a significant selection of my photographic work throughout the last decade, with several images drawn from the South.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I would play myself. I’d ask friends Tom Gilroy or Randy Walker to direct.

What is a one sentence synopsis of your book?

Poetry is not an elevator speech. For a time, I talked about the book in terms of the project being about my experiences as an Asian-American woman living in the South. But this set up a certain expectation in readers about identity politics in the work that seemed to undermine the sublety and complexity of how the work operates together. Now, I am thinking along the lines of “The poet’s detour into the pequliar.”

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

I assembled the bulk of the poems over a three-year period. Once I saw the shape of the manuscript, I knocked it out in three months once I was back in the Pacific Northwest, writing about 20 new poems for the book.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I needed to write about the strange detour that my life took to get it out of my system and move on. I am done with the South and will never again live in Texas or anywhere within the Bible Belt/Stroke Belt. I had been exploring place-based writing during my time living in Arkansas, which included working with two geographers from the University of Central Arkansas on a mapping project that became an autocartography of my migration patterns and the influence that place had on my different projects. That mapping work helped me to breakthrough in my thinking about Aux Arcs, to arrive at a way of writing about the South that was true to my own experiences. I needed to finish the book, so that I could move on and apply these lessons to a book project that I am now working on about Taiwan.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

The themes in this book include marginality, animality, labor, visual art, geography, memory, and criminality. I think the photos will really lure readers who may be curious about how these two creative practices intersect in my process and approaches. This book is also biographical.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

The book will be published by the inimitable La Alameda Press.