Emily Lee Luan
苦痛痛苦
苦難艱苦
苦澀悲苦
苦悶愁苦
苦惱困苦
苦頭受苦
苦笑吃苦
苦命辛苦

 
A toiling
A labored
Bloom
Enough
A bloody
Making 
Melon: 
Sautéed
Fermented
To me
Sugar
Still makes
A sadness
Savor my
Sick
Make of		 an astringent lowness
misery. My love used to
overnight, the streets wide
for me to walk down. Life
toe or two. Easy. But I’ve been
my mother’s bitter
halved, hollowed out,
with garlic, salt, the eyes of
black beans opening
from the pan. It’s not
I crave, but an ache that
the tongue water.
held in the mouth. Is this
ceaseless condition? If so, I’m
with it. Pull out my molars.
me a simpler O.
from the book 回 / RETURN / Nightboat Books
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I wrote this poem after learning about the work of Taiwanese poet Chen Li, who uses the pictographic nuances of traditional Chinese characters to create visual poems—they are beautiful, tapestry-like. In writing, I attempted to answer the question: "How can I use the breadth of a character’s visual possibility to impart meaning, even to a non-Chinese-speaking audience?"

Emily Lee Luan on "Bitterness Is the Chinese Root of Emotional Hurt"
A photograph from Bernadette Mayer's 1971 photo-and-text-project, Memory
Bernadette Mayer: "Nothing Is a Memory"

"Mayer swings like a human wrecking ball at just about every liter­ary truism, received binary, and easy contradiction that she encoun­ters: the narrative stasis of memory; the supposed woo-woo laxity of automatic writing; the supposed conservatism of traditional prosody and form; the interwoven performances of motherhood, gender, sexuality, class, and art-making. She lays it all to waste."

via THE YALE REVIEW
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Cover image of Chris Dombrowski's book, Ragged Anthem
What Sparks Poetry:
Chris Dombrowski on "Just a little green, like the nights when the northern lights perform"

"From my seat alongside Rattlesnake Creek, I looked upstream toward the high-elevation wilderness snowfields that framed and fed the floodplain. The water at my feet had once resided there, and before that it existed as moisture trapped inside a cloud, and perhaps before that as fog, the slough’s breath, the valley’s exhalation, ad infinitum."
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