Foreigner's Folly: A Tale of Attempted Project

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Poetry. Asian American Studies. "'I wanted to be a priori but I was processed meat.' In Ji Yoon Lee's evisceral-guidebook-cum-cautionary-tale, roadkill reassembles itself into a zombie-dolly, her head screwed to the mouth of a gun, and through this megaphone does battle with the smug autocorrectors guarding English's/the Internet's gates. Language becomes so distressed it eats its own fingers, it makes the datestamp second guess itself, normative syntax shreds to a slasher film, Time a snuff. 'My splice sentence had its guts spilling out.' Lee's sic text, her tic idiolect, is contagious, vectored by the inequity and the iniquity that make the world go round. Coming attractions, I'm coming! The uncanny, now in cans."—Joyelle McSweeney

"FOREIGNER'S FOLLY is a bastard child of English, a frolicking anti-colonial translation machine."—Don Mee Choi

"Can the 'mommy-simulator' speak? This is a book I've been waiting for! This 'elegy concert' for communication (in the tradition of Theresa Cha and Myung Mi Kim but also Chelsey Minnis and Ara Shirinyan) is painfully funny, vividly cartoon-violent, brilliant and gorgeously paced. At last we have the 'Attempted Project' that demonstrates the failure of each success and the success of every failure of assimilation, exposing the power dynamic of those terms. It's a set of sequences to read aloud, for consolation and encouragement—for who here hasn't 'become an apologizing machine' in the mastery of language... a mastery which is, of course, an enslavement? 'I can't speak without sounding injured'—as the poet notes—and these poems make a space to laugh!"—Laura Mullen

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