Togetherness

It’s no easy feat to tell the truth, nakedly (or at least in a rhinestoned nude illusion)… and Wo does it with so much style, humor, and emotion that it always breaks your heart (and heals it all over again.)  Get ready to sob, laugh hysterically, nod knowingly, stop in your tracks and go back and reread it from the start! Give it up for the unparalleled gift that is Wo Chan!

Every poem is a mouthful of meat, music and memory. These poems are vulnerable and resilient, fluid and focused. A versatile and verbal poetics—an inimitable Wo Channess anchors these narratives of personal, cultural, and sexual survival. It is possible to live (on poetry) in a country that tries to kill you. The evidence is in every Wo Chan poem.

Wo Chan’s brave exuberance, their mercurial surfaces and depths both, line for line seem to say, “What is a heart for if you can’t put sequins on it, or glue gun it to your sleeve, or wipe your nose?” Wo Chan’s poetry and performances have sustained me for years, a favorite source of pleasure, solace, disruption, accountability, community—for years I have wanted this book and here it is now, the poems have gathered for their sublime cabaret. Nothing I could say would prepare you, except maybe an invitation: pick up this bright masterpiece, it is your turn to experience this love.

This is a poet unafraid to tackle the tacky and the tasty; the gutter and glitter—those grand parallels of a life made for or and on the margins. In linguistic loop de loops—some delightful, others terrifying—Wo Chan perceives an America we can now easily recognize from a poet who suffers the wounds, but wants them healed.