The Department of English invites you to a joint book launch for Professors Michael Leong, “Dear Vase Already Shattered Against the Fragile Floor,” and Travis Chi Wing Lau, “What's Left Is Tender.”
Please join us in the Community Foundation Theater, located in the Gund Gallery, on Thursday, Oct. 23, at 5:00 p.m.
Robert P. Hubbard Assistant Professor of Poetry Michael Leong
Leong's “Dear Vase Already Shattered Against the Fragile Floor” is the third volume in a projected pentalogy that draws on literary collage, formal constraint and rhetorical complication to concentrate, transform and re-release the contingencies of chaos. The first two volumes “Cutting Time with a Knife” (2012) and “Words on Edge” (2018) are also from Black Square Editions.
An experiment in what Leong calls a “disorientalist poetics,” “Dear Vase” is haunted by three disparate figures from East Asian cultural history, two real and one imagined: Tang Dynasty poet Li Po (701-762), landscape painter Jeong Seon (1676-1759), and “Hiroshima poet” Araki Yasusada (1907-1972), a yellowface fabrication. In the face of various Orientalisms — including the lures of “auto-Orientalism,” “meta-Orientalism” and “re-Orientalism” — Leong's surrealist poetry wagers upon an ethics and aesthetics of disorientation.
Assistant Professor of English Travis Chi Wing Lau
Lau's “What's Left Is Tender” explores tenderness as an act, an affect, a relation, a sensation, a theory. In a series of lyric and formal experiments, this collection interrogates how tenderness is often at the very intersections of disability, queerness and race and how often that tenderness can also simultaneously mean struggle, discomfort and even trauma. These poems explore the tenderness of being cared for, of caring for others and how that care can sometimes itself be painful even as it may attempt to ease that pain. This book ultimately asks if poetry's tenderness can tender new ways of thinking about ethics of care.