*WINNER* of the 2023 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature
Finalist for the Firecracker Award for Poetry!
Togetherness
A debut poetry collection in which non-binary poet and drag performer Wo Chan recounts stories from their queer childhood and adolescence.
Poetry
$9.99 – $17.95
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.
Praise
Wo Chan’s debut hurtles past any praise I can heap on it. Acutely aware of the cruelty of the nation-state and of the exhilarating splendor of drag, Chan’s language—razor sharp, captivating—refuses to demure, to clarify. A wide range of formal approaches and a structure that’s sheer genius troubles assumptions, disrupts notions of “togetherness.” I will be teaching this book.
Show More +Show Less -
Details
ISBN: 9781643621449
Paperback, 80 pages, 6 x 9 in
Publication Date: September 20, 2022
Reviews
This refreshing debut gathers its power by exploring the overlaps between gender, sex, language, and nationality. […] 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.
Show More +Show Less -
