Experimenting with a mixture of humor and pathos, the conceptual and the conversational, Wong circles solitude, the emotion perhaps best understood through invocations of absence.There is the impression a body leaves behind on a bed, a dramatic gap or hole in our lives, a hole through which we fall. Take a look at the opening lines of the opening poem, "Private Parts: Anti-Bodies," and you'll see what I mean. An exploration of bodies, cities, and the rifts within them, Crevasse looks at the tiny cracks that break along the borders of public and private selves. However, Wong doesn't really need my help Crevasse is leaking poetry. The assistant poetry editor for Drunken Boat, Wong writes of bodies and antibodies, of Hong Kong and the Queen of England, of sexual awakenings, of race, of desire, of what we might see and know through the body, of politics as well as the erotic, of mourning and loss., I imagine pronouncing Nicholas Wong's new book "cruh-VASS," with the emphasis on the second syllable. Wong writes in a seemingly causal, confessional, even glib voice about experiences and memories that discomfit us. Readers are invited to both feel and think in ways that create a dis-ease, in ways that push against expectations, in ways that challenge comfort. These lines are invested in sentiment as well as intellect. Crevasse is a gathering of poems that startle in the insistent way they play with memory, history, form, and the expectations we as readers bring to poems.
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