Togetherness
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A debut poetry collection in which non-binary poet and drag performer Wo Chan recounts stories from their queer childhood and adolescence.
Togetherness sends out sparks from its electric surface, radiating energy and verve from within its deep and steady emotional core: stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant, culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads weave together monologue, soaring lyric descants, and document, taking the positions of apostrophe, biography, and soulful plaint to stage a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is drag—at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This refreshing debut gathers its power by exploring the overlaps between gender, sex, language, and nationality. Chan's speaker draws on the language of the body and the details of an immigrant experience to reveal what cannot easily be categorized. A snapshot of their family's Chinese restaurant becomes not only a space for autobiography, but an inventory of polyphonic democracy: "mid-life Caucasians, stoned truants, strange dates, Black worship,/ beige infant, the red hat society, gray bouffant, heavy demanding rings,/ and my own family, each face distilled in the steamtable mirror." Chan, a drag performer, is equally adept at the kind of linguistic play that challenges the absurdity of fixed categories: "I said field of thyme/ with an ‘h'/ as in yew-man & yew-bris & yew-mid/ as in yewman yewbris in the yewmid afterrain heat." Throughout this vivid and surprising work, Chan intersperses unattributed letters in support of their family's immigration efforts, further destabilizing the boundaries between speaker and audience, individual and collective. Daring and original, Chan's poetry collapses categories to create inspired art.
