Description
Poetry. LGBT Studies. Winner of the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. CREVASSE, Hong Kong-based writer Nicholas Wong's newest collection of poetry, starts with an epigraph from Maurice Merleau-Ponty that notes the impossibility of observing one's own physical body and, therefore, the necessity of a "second," "unobservable" body from which to view one's own. The poems in Crevasse seek to uncover the thread connecting these mutually observed and observing bodies. Like Samuel Beckett and others before him, Wong has deliberately chosen to write in a non-native language-English, his second language after Cantonese. Freed from the assumptions and conventions of his mother tongue, Wong strips down, interrogates and ultimately reorients the fragmented complexities of the multiple communities he inhabits-queer, Asian, poet, reader, lover-in a collection of poems that exposes the gap between familiarity and the inevitable distance of the body.
Author Bio
Nicholas Wong is the author of BESIEGE ME (Noemi Press, 2021), and CREVASSE (Kaya Press, 2015), the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. He is also the recipient of the Australian Book Review's Peter Porter Poetry Prize. His poem has been longlisted for the University of Canberra Vice Chancellor's International Poetry Prize in 2019. Wong has contributed writing to the radio composition project One of the Two Stories, Or Both at the Manchester International Festival 2017, and the catalogue of the exhibition One Hand Clapping at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He teaches at the Education University of Hong Kong.
Author City: Hong Kong HOK