See: Stand: Say: A Statement of Poetics

My poems are lyric and narrative movements towards clarity of vision. In my work, I look. I look at myself, at nature, at the cultures I live in, at the stories I’m told, at the things I believe, etc., etc. This looking, I believe is critical because it is revelatory: in looking deeply, with a poetics of attention and care, the connections between individuals and histories, between emotions and actions, between memory and movement are revealed. If I look long and hard enough, the gaps in my vision also become visible, and I discover my blank spaces—what I’m asked not to see, what I don’t let myself see, what I’ve suppressed or rejected. A poetics of witness, then, also emerges out of this looking, and my poems often address issues of social justice and the often-invisible structures of power in an effort to make them more visible to readers as well as to myself.

My first book, Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014), was born of this poetics, and my new work, Honeyfish, applies this poetics to the idea of place. As an immigrant to the United States and an avid traveller, I’m constantly thinking about what it means to inhabit, to occupy, and to belong. The relationship between self and place is constant and dynamic; it is the site of history, both personal and public; it is reflective, the one mirroring the other; and it is fraught with the tensions of power, desire, memory and loss. Reaching toward the heart of this complication, I explore what it means to be from a place, or in a place, and what it means to move between places (which include times and cultures). In the poems, I wrestle with questions about travel and immigration: What’s left? What’s lost? What stays? How do I ‘be’ here or there? How do I speak, and can anyone understand me? Overall, these poems are all movements toward a central concern: how we see where we are from where we are, what it means to be a part of and apart from— the haunting that is our idea of home.