John Yau and Albert Mobilio select a few choice titles from the past year.
Cathy Park Hong
Posted inArt
A Conversation Series Emerges In Response to Racism During Pandemic
The first event, “Addressing Prejudices Against Asian Americans During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” features Cathy Park Hong and Anicka Yi, among others.
Posted inBooks
What Hyperallergic Is Reading Right Now
Hyperallergic staff are all working from home these days and we thought we’d share what we’ve been reading in our private moments offline.
Posted inPoetry
This Be the Verse 2012
An annotated list of some of Albert Mobilio’s and John Yau’s favorite poetry books published this year.
Posted inPoetry
At Play in the Fields of Language: The Poetry of Cathy Park Hong (Part Two)
Engine Empire (2012) is divided into three discrete sections or, perhaps more accurately, three self-sustaining worlds, each with its own invented languages.
In each section Hong utilizes radical forms and devices — a list, an abededarian, a lipogram — to propel her poems out of the lyric torpor so many other poets embrace. The language is volatile, undergoing metamorphosis and extreme pressure. Tremors of discomfort suffuse throughout the music of Hong’s poems.
Posted inPoetry
At Play in The Fields of Language: The Poetry of Cathy Park Hong (Part One )
The argument between lyric poetry (that is poetry that arises from the poet’s voice (the “I”) or what Robert Grenier characterized as “SPEECH”) and text (the primacy of the written or printed word) is becoming an increasingly obsolete opposition. Globalism and immigration (or migration) – in the form of pidgin, mispronunciation, graffiti, and encoded signs – have overrun the various geographical boundaries as well as upended the rules defining areas of fixed vocabulary, grammar and spelling. The English language – particularly in America — is a field in which decay and replenishment are ongoing, unpredictable ruptures.
