Pub Day! :O
Pandemic Diaries #12
Nov 21, 2020
Pub Day!
Dear friends,
Today is the day my chapbook leaves the insides of my most private language, and into the wild. Won't you celebrate with me? Perhaps ivite your loved ones you are quarantining with, maybe your cat? Of all the terribleness this year, what an unexpected light - I am so moved. Tonight, as I am about to go to sleep in China and wake up in a few hours for this party-- I'm thinking of everyone whose virtual presences have changed me this year, all who taught me to be kinder to myself and my poems throughout the years.
Yesterday in class, Anne Carson said -- after I invited my fourth friend to join us in class -- that I was "a lint ball rolling around the world collecting people." And...honestly, I feel seen. I am feeling so emotional just thinking about all the people whose light has touched me, and brought these poems in the chapbook into being. How lucky I am, that my borders once collided with your's! I'm going to have to resist shouting out everyone during the launch ...
You can still RSVP here to join us today.
***
TO RED DUST
was the first piece I wrote in the mfa that I was proud of, towards the end of my first year. Something cracked open when I started writing about Red Dust, and many more spilled out, red and shapeless. I still don’t know where they are trying to take me, but this was where they first came into being. There are two "To Red Dust" sections in the chapbook, both of them recently published online, I wanted to share them here today because they feel like they are written in a private language, something too close to see properly.
For the past two years I resisted sharing this piece even when it was accepted for publication, something always felt, shamefully, not yet right. But I think I’m ready now. Thank you Tupelo Press for giving this love. Stills are from Mona Hatoum’s “measures of distance” from within which I found language.
read the rest on Tupelo Press., where it was named an honorable mention for its Poetry in the Pandemic folio. Funnily enough, this piece was also shortlisted for the Cosmonauts Avenue Nonfiction Prize last year which threw me into a small crisis about what "genre" to call my work. I'm still not sure, but I now find this blurring of genres generative.
*** Here is the second To Red Dust section published in The Common. There are seven sections that came out in one go:
Read the rest here on The Common.
As always, thank you for coming with me on this journey. Take care, my friends!
love,
JinJin