Contemporary Authors

• House A Omnidawn (Oakland, CA), 2016

1. House A LCCN 2016015123 Type of material Book Personal name Cheng, Jennifer S., 1983- author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title House A / Jennifer S. Cheng. Published/Produced Oakland, California : Omnidawn Publishing, 2016. Description 122 pages ; 23 cm ISBN 9781632430236 (pbk. : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PS3603.H4598 A6 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems - 2018 Tarpaulin Sky Press, Grafton, VT
• Invocation: an Essay - 2011 New Michigan Press, Tucson, AZ

• Jennifer S. Cheng Home Page - http://jenniferscheng.com/about

  Jennifer S. Cheng received her BA from Brown University, MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa, and MFA in Poetry from San Francisco State University. She is the author of MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems, selected by Bhanu Kapil as winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize (May 2018), HOUSE A, selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize, and Invocation: An Essay (New Michigan Press), a chapbook in which fragments of text, photographs, found images, and white space influence one another to create meaning. A U.S. Fulbright scholar, Kundiman fellow, and Bread Loaf work-study scholar, she is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Harold Taylor Award, the Ann Fields Poetry Award, the Mid-American Review Fineline Prize, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her poetry and lyric essays appear in Tin House, AGNI, Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, The Normal School, DIAGRAM, The Volta, The Offing, Sonora Review, Seneca Review, Hong Kong 20/20 (a PEN HK anthology), and elsewhere. Having grown up in Texas, Hong Kong, and Connecticut, she currently lives in rapture of the coastal prairies of northern California.

  She participates in women-curated adventures at Drop Leaf Press.

  “What is the strangest thing you have ever seen?” is a question she answers amongst others.

  Here is an essay.

  Here is something of an ars poetica / theory of aesthetics.

  Here is a poem with whales in it.

  *

  { inventory }: dislocation, home-building, house/geometry, immigration/emigration, hybridity, liminality, shadows, absence as presence, connection/disconnection, language/linguistics, language as a textural experience, body & landscape, landscape as lover, the body, what the body knows without conscious articulation, bewilderment/wilderness, maps/mapping, myth-making, iteration,

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/poetry/jennifer-s-cheng-conversation-vi-khi-nao/

  QUOTED: "When I was writing the letters, it was the epistolary address that allowed the words to formulate; without this heavy ghost to explain to/confront/complicate, I would have no way to say what I needed to say. The address also creates a built-in tension between intimacy and elusiveness that feels very necessary to the project and the truths it is trying to convey."
  "Strangely when writing these letters to Mao, I did feel a kind of collaborative motioning with my parents and grandparents. I felt like I was in conversation in this very loose and murmuring way with ancestral voices, especially because the book is attempting to describe how history is something that is absorbed and passed down in ineffable, bodily ways. Writing toward the literal/metaphorical house my parents constructed—the structures and objects and pathways that shape my body’s navigations—this feels a very real collaboration."
  "I had been thinking for a while about the liminality of history and narrative, especially for immigrant homes, and I had been thinking, too, about my compulsion toward iterative rhythms. In writing to Mao in this prose poem form, I was following an instinct I did not yet fully comprehend — I didn’t know where it was going—but I felt how such an address opened up a field that could contain all the overlapping emotions, atmospheres, and histories I had been wanting to hold in one hand."
  "I wanted the tension in the leaps between sentences to carry all the absences and ambiguities in the most embedded and invisible ways. You could say I had been waiting my whole life to articulate my sense of identity/home to History, and this gave me the language and form to do it in a way that felt most whole."

  Jennifer S. Cheng in Conversation with Vi Khi Nao
  INTERVIEWS POETRY
  By Vi Khi Nao
  11/28/2017
  VI KHI NAO: When was the last time someone gave you an A-frame hug? What was it like? Was it like hugging a house?

  JENNIFER S. CHENG: This morning I hugged my partner goodbye, and every day it’s like hugging a new-but-same house, even as we form a roof with our leaning bodies.

  Between your mind or your heart, which is more fluid? And, which resembles the ocean more?

  I think my mind is more fluid but my heart is more like the ocean; that is, my mind feels always awash, circulating and spiraling and never quite feeling tethered, while my heart inclines toward a vague immensity.

  If Mao were to reply back to your missives, what would you want him to say and would you want his voice to be childlike like yours? Or would you like it to embody a particular kind of revolution born from the death of a thought or sentence?

  This is an eerie question because I have been privately writing about Mao’s letters to me, and in it I am constantly observing how his letters are full of holes and ink stains, his handwriting wobbly like he is on a train or bus, his lines full of odd shadows. Maybe at some point I will spill coffee on his missives on purpose. In any case he is never forthright and is always self-absorbed. I am always deciphering him.

  If you were to construct a house for Mao’s relatives in words, would it look like the artistic manuscript of House A? Do you ever think of Mao’s relatives and what they would say to you on Mao’s behalf perhaps if they came upon your epistolary letters?

  What a terrifying thought! The truth is I hardly ever think of Mao as an actual person, he is so ingrained in me as a looming and ephemeral presence, it’s like asking what the relatives of a boogeyman would say. But to answer your initial question, I suspect it would be a hundred pages of a single persistent block of text.

  What part of your body (your toes, your lungs, etc.) resembles an emotional house, a house born from intuition, the most?

  My lungs for sure — not the one I use to speak aloud, but the one that is silent (with its own volume) and internal and in that way most like the ocean. You could maybe hear it, like a shell, with your ear against my ribcage.

  If you could spread apart and fold your lungs so that it’s a sheet of paper, where would you write its first line? And, where on that sheet of lung-made paper would you place your first image of a small drawing of your heart?

  Together in the corner, ever so small, just as the boundary begins to curve.

  Have you come near to drowning? Your House A is full of water. Have you drowned in your own house? I get the sense from your manuscript that sleep gets along with your water the most. In context to your writing, what wouldn’t get along with water, do you think?

  Sometimes I am drowning in my house, but sometimes I am swimming. Most of the time, I am floundering. I once swam out into the ocean and suddenly realized I was in the middle of something vast and seemingly infinite; I started to panic and stutter wildly toward shore, and two sea turtles showed up, slow and ancient creatures, distracting and calming me. I am trying to think of what wouldn’t get along with water, what its opposite is, but of course even things like corners and angles would feel at home immersed and submerged. Maybe I just think that water and sleep are the most truthful conditions of being alive, permeating and unparseable.

  When do you feel least alive? What aspect of modern life stops you from breathing?

  When I am in too close proximity to the capitalist/hierarchical/hegemonic machine I feel suffocated (as many do). When I have to socially perform inside this machine, my body breaks down (in the form of panic attacks).

  Are you a strong swimmer? Like Michael Phelps. If you were to teach Michael Phelps to emotionally compete in poetic swimming competition so he could win the Olympics of Poetry, what poetic rhetorical device would you inculcate in him? What do you think Phelps need to learn in order to perform well in your sea or swimming pool?

  Although I feel at home underwater, in reality I am a weak swimmer (or are the two related?). I don’t know much about Michael Phelps except that he might be a jerk? Is this true or am I confusing him with another Olympic swimmer? In any case I cannot even begin to imagine such a body so unlike my own in my seascape or personal swimming pool. He might need to learn how to half-drown and flail silently to swim here.

  I don’t know Michael Phelps personally so I can’t confirm his jerkiness, but he is a strong swimmer I believe. Some say the way he swims is almost poetry or poetry itself. I have seen him swim and he is not poetry, but I love the way he manipulates water, makes it behave almost like air. How deep is your relationship to air, Jenny? I know your relationship with water is very deep. You spoke of the moon quite frequently too in your writing and I think it’s vastly because of your artistic-based nautical relationship with the sea.

  I think I am confusing him with someone else, how awful of me. But I like what you say about how a body can manipulate water as if it were air. I do think of water and air similarly: things that surround us all the time, that we are always displacing with our movements and navigations, that are always enveloping and spilling at the same time. Air is more invisible to us, but really they are both weather stitching in our bodies. I have been finishing up a new manuscript, and it is all moon, and in it I am thinking about how the moon pulls on our bodies the way it pulls on the earth’s water.

  What is your favorite fish to eat? And if you were to read a poem from your House A to it before eating, which poem would you pick and why?

  In Hong Kong my favorite fish to eat with my grandmother is lao hu yu, steamed with scallions and ginger. I would not read a poem to it, but maybe I would sing it: the shortest page, the one about my small mouth haunting the air.

  What did it taste like, Jenny? And, why was it your favorite?

  It tastes like clouds in seawater! My favorite tastes and textures: mild, flaky. It carries a light but luxuriant broth. It is my grandmother’s favorite fish, too, so it is forever attached to those memories.

  Are you close with your grandmother? What was her house like? And, your memory of it? Is there one particular memory you have of her you wish to share?

  I am close with my grandmother in that we rarely talk but she cooks all my favorite foods whenever I am there. Growing up, she and my grandfather lived in an apartment complex called Mei Foo, and mostly I remember the smell of mothballs and some other aroma I can never place — a kind of Chinese medicine? I will never know. Later when I was older, she and my grandfather would insist on giving me cups of warm, sugared milk, even though I am lactose intolerant, and I would take the cup into my bedroom and pour it slowly out the window. These are the things that make me feel most tender.

  How often do you visit them? Would you translate your Hose A into Chinese characters so that they would have access to them? Giving your grandparents the key to your own house.

  I try to visit every year; it feels more and more urgent as they age. My grandfather actually has very elegant English, and he read the book and said he did not understand it; he is always trying to convince me to write fiction like his favorite detective stories. (The more I think about the idea of House A in Chinese, the more I feel a warmth instead of fear. Now I am wondering if I might translate one of the pieces and email it to my grandparents. I love that — a key to my house — I think you just helped me through a door I did not consider permissible.)

  Why don’t you think he understand it? What about it that makes it inaccessible to him? Do you want him to understand it?

  I feel like there is something deeply complex about this question that keeps me from puncturing it; I am also thinking about it in relation to my mother. Language is such a complicated and fraught thing for immigrants and children of immigrants — a thing of multiple layers and immensities, both linguistic and emotional — perhaps it makes me sensitive to the ways in which we each have our own private language in addition to our other shared languages. Maybe I have lived my life with so many languages and silences, gaps in language that are their own hefty intimacies, that I do not feel the need for even those most intimate to me to share in this other interior language of mine. They have their own impenetrable language, so maybe the inaccessibility is not surprising or wounding to me.

  In one of your interviews, Litseen asked “What would you like to see happen in your lifetime,” and you replied, “Another discovery I’ve made in the past couple years as I’ve immersed myself more fully in a culture somewhat different than my own.” Will writing in a private language that your grandfather could understand a kind of immersion fully in a culture somewhat different than your own? Like writing the kind of detective novels he desired?

  YES. You are drawing so many doors for me, Vi, where I thought only of walls. I want to write a detective novel (a short one) about marooned seashells and send that to my grandfather.

  I am so glad! In your future collection, you are writing all sorts of letters to all sorts of words, objects, and subjects, did Mao’s ghost(s) or your missives to him inspire that impulse of continuation? To continue the lineage of historical or linguistic or anthropological impersonal? Do you ever fear your relationship to the unknown in that particular mode would die if you cease to pursue that kind of epistolary dialogue?

  There is a shared haunting, the sense of being haunted by a presence that is absence and vice versa. In the same way that I think every utterance is a kind of prayer, everything we do also feels like a kind of epistolary address, as if these were the most primal forms of articulation and gesture. And both only exist because you are never sure if you will be heard, whom you are speaking to, what you are circling.

  I do feel that your epistolary letters to Mao in the traditional epistolary form are very tender and forgiving and childlike in their emotional arcs – which isn’t to say that other non-traditional epistolary impulses aren’t — but there is something about Dear Mao, space, and a large container of emotions, memories, and shared intimacies that make your letters to Mao stand out artistically that other indirect missive-like containers won’t possess the same emotional cadence and warmth and depth. Do you feel this way too?

  I wonder if it is the particular combination of intimacy and urgency, the specific need to be heard/seen by someone, a motion toward some shape rather than, say, a smaller circling inside oneself. I’m not sure if that makes sense. When I was writing the letters, it was the epistolary address that allowed the words to formulate; without this heavy ghost to explain to/confront/complicate, I would have no way to say what I needed to say. The address also creates a built-in tension between intimacy and elusiveness that feels very necessary to the project and the truths it is trying to convey.

  Almost like having a muse.

  Yes. A muse, a container, a constraint. Otherwise there is just undefined vastness.

  If an editor in Artforum were to ask you to collaborate on an artistic project with a whale on a topic about painting an abstract portrait of the moon, what would your conversation with that whale look like?

  It would begin with me asking the whale what lullaby it would like to hear. I am not sure why I am feeling a need to sing to animals and carcasses right now.

  Has your father read your letters to Mao? If so, what did he think of them? If your father were to write a letter to Mao, what would he include in that letter (or letters)? Would you collaborate with your parents or even grandparents in writing letters to Mao?

  The idea of writing from another’s perspective (unless fictional/mythical) is terrifying to me for its impossibility; it is a fear of inhabiting someone else’s vantage point and getting it wrong (which is inevitable). Sometimes I think this is where my lack of imagination stems from: fear. But strangely when writing these letters to Mao, I did feel a kind of collaborative motioning with my parents and grandparents. I felt like I was in conversation in this very loose and murmuring way with ancestral voices, especially because the book is attempting to describe how history is something that is absorbed and passed down in ineffable, bodily ways. Writing toward the literal/metaphorical house my parents constructed — the structures and objects and pathways that shape my body’s navigations — this feels a very real collaboration.

  To gain some access to your consciousness, one of my favorite questions to ask in an interview is: will you break down a poem from House A for the readers. Tell us what went through your mind when you wrote it.

  Writing can feel like a trance, something my brain is not fully in control of at first, as if I were dancing or sculpting. But in thinking about the first prose poem, the first of my letters to Mao, I know that it was a summer afternoon and I was at home in my fourth-floor apartment, which has a tiny marginal view of the Pacific. Perhaps I had just finished reading an anthropology paper on the phenomenology of sleep. I had been thinking for a while about the liminality of history and narrative, especially for immigrant homes, and I had been thinking, too, about my compulsion toward iterative rhythms. In writing to Mao in this prose poem form, I was following an instinct I did not yet fully comprehend — I didn’t know where it was going — but I felt how such an address opened up a field that could contain all the overlapping emotions, atmospheres, and histories I had been wanting to hold in one hand: the shadow of Mao simply and ever present, the feeling of safety yet aloneness in our Texas house, how we felt apart from others which only reinforced our collective interiority, how migration and home were always interwoven inside me… I didn’t want to parse the entanglements because that would be impossible and untruthful; but instead I wanted the tension in the leaps between sentences to carry all the absences and ambiguities in the most embedded and invisible ways. You could say I had been waiting my whole life to articulate my sense of identity/home to History, and this gave me the language and form to do it in a way that felt most whole.

  What poem from your House A makes you feel most vulnerable or make you feel most intimate with the ocean?

  This is like asking which of my (hypothetical) children feel most like family!

  What was your mother’s favorite passage from your House A? Have you read it out loud to her? Would you want to?

  My mother flew to San Francisco for my book launch, and during the reading she may have fallen asleep. English is a difficult language for her, full of large cavities and rocky places, so I do not blame her. The language we share is somewhere else; I do not share my writing with her; I am okay with that. I almost feel it would be an act of stranger, of violence, to read my work aloud to her.

  How wonderful that she fell asleep at your reading. You wrote on page 12 of House A, “We all long for narrative. Mine begins with water or sleep, or the feeling of my parents moving about the house on summer afternoons.” Your mother helped you begin the narrative of your book launch by sleeping, one side of your beginning. On the maiden voyage of your book, who was its twins, Jenny?

  My father reminds me to drink a full of glass of water every morning as my first act of waking.

  When Asians squat, their squatting resembles an A-frame house, almost like the one figuratively limned in your manuscript. Have you squatted while writing poetry or performing a reading? When you are squatting, do you feel that you are opening a door or closing it? I have squatted while writing and my legs fell asleep! Writing poetry can be dangerous to a person’s sense of balance.

  I have squatted in many places and circumstances (to pee, to eat, to rest, to pause), and mostly I just feel closer to the ground. I cannot recall ever squatting to write, but I do love the image of you writing and losing your balance. What you say is so true that I have no response and can only nod, yes.

  As daughter of immigrants, if you were to build a boat for your poems, would you choose a canoe, sailboat, kayak, gondola, raft, catamaran, or trimaran or a cruise ship?

  A raft or canoe, something that carries the shape of my body or its maneuverings in some way. Surely not a cruise ship.

QUOTED: "In this exhilarating exploration, Cheng ... fashions an alt-epic for the twenty-first century."
"As visionary as it is practical" "rich and glorious book."

Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems
Publishers Weekly. 265.16 (Apr. 16, 2018): p69.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems

Jennifers. Cheng. Tarpaulin Sky, $16 trade

paper (144p) ISBN 978-1-939460-15-8

In this exhilarating exploration, Cheng (House A) fashions an alt-epic for the 21st century, upending received ideas about poetic form and constructing from the debris a hybrid guide for an age of diaspora and displacement: "Sometimes in order to build something, you must unbuild it first." The text is sourced in large part from Chinese folk tales and makes women's experience primary: "I wanted to say: a new aesthetics of domesticity. I wanted to say: she." Experiences of unmooring and unsettling call for new maps; Cheng's cartography works by myth and lyric, supposition and premonition, breathtaking abstraction and heartbreaking specificity: "If the purpose of a map is to show us the way home, then what I want is a navigational marker that spreads outward, or deepens in a location I can begin with my own two sticks and a handful of pebbles." In abundant, associative lists of what has been left behind and what should be brought along, Cheng offers strategies for spanning the distances between places of longing and belonging, such as "a red string tied around my foot, running across the globe, ending/ around your ankle." As visionary as it is practical, Cheng's rich and glorious book is a record of this precarious moment, a "brief and eternal standstill of a half-sunk world, half-rebirthed." (May)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 69. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532695/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fd4c9f1c. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532695

"Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 69. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532695/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fd4c9f1c. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.

• Medium
  https://medium.com/anomalyblog/house-a-by-jennifer-s-cheng-a1777f0390f8
  Word count: 1893

  QUOTED: "throughout House A, Jennifer S. Cheng engages with the twin concepts of house and home as she navigates both internal and external terrain to create a poetry that is as engaging as it is intelligent, that is both wide in scope even as it is tethered to specific circumstances related to being the daughter of immigrants, and that invites the reader to investigate their own spaces, their own origins, and the structures and concepts with which they order and populate their lives."

  Jenny Drai
  Jenny Drai is the author of Wine Dark, Letters to Quince, [the door], and The New Sorrow Is Less Than The Old Sorrow. She lives in Bonn, Germany.
  Feb 24, 2017
  House A by Jennifer S. Cheng

  Courtesy of Omnidawn ©2016
  If we can posit, and I think we can, that the relationships we form between ourselves and the others that cross into and inhabit our personal orbits take place not only within space — space, that is, that manages to be simultaneously expansive and interstitial — but within the width and breadth of the words we choose as we communicate, within the scope of language itself, then perhaps we can posit that language itself is equal to space. Indeed, it is space, language, and relationships (to history, to the author/speaker’s immigrant parents) that Jennifer S. Cheng examines in House A, her collection of poetry and winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize. The collection begins with a series of letters to Mao where the author takes on, in many ways, the role of both emotionally-invested party — it is, after all, in her father’s cabinet that she finds the picture of Mao that she addresses — as well as the role of the supposedly (supposedly, that is, in the popular mind) more objective “anthropologist who traces the longing for home between personal biography and the biography of the collective, a map that ends beyond locatable distances into mythical terrains, imaginary homelands.” Written at the end of a letter that discusses the “poetic forces” of sleeping insects and the “ritual of body and landscape” of migrating birds, Cheng seems to be suggesting that observation (by the anthropologist, by the self) may be intricately connected not only to the mapping of space and the language where the body takes place, but to the very formation of that space itself. Other vital, interconnected spaces explored by Cheng through the “Letters to Mao” sequence include water — crossing water, after all, is so often part of the immigrant experience — sleep (a necessary kind of restorative bodily space that stands, in House A, both as a stopping place in the mental mind, and as a place where truth can be grasped, only to be lost and grasped again), as well as a child’s acquisition of language and narrative. But it is also the nuances of language that the reader will encounter as she pages through the accrual of personal, mythological landscape that these letters represent, such as the distinctions between home (the constructed space of the self?) and homeland (origin?). As Cheng addresses Mao, “I want to describe for you the watery life of home, and by that I do not mean the ambiguity of homeland. For homeland is something embalmed in someone else’s memory, or it is a symbol, both close to the heart and a stranger you reach for in the middle of the night.” Whether this reaching out in the night takes place within wakefulness or within sleep remains itself a beautiful ambiguity, but we already have seen Cheng, elsewhere in “Letters to Mao,” writes, “If sleep were a language, it would not sound like nothing but would instead materialize both longing and distance, history and myth.” Perhaps, we may surmise, this reaching out is in and of itself a kind of language, a way to form space with the body, to locate place within space, via language (or sound), such as in the practice of echolocation. (Echoes feature later on in House A.) But why write these letters at all? Cheng tells us (and Mao) that “what I am doing is trying to give you a history of water, which, like memory and sleep, is fluid and wafting in refracted light. History as water, so that I am giving you something that spreads.” What that something is may be knowledge itself, and more specifically, the sort of knowledge that contextualizes and charts, that places the immigrant body within swallowing terrain.

  °

  Jennifer S. Cheng
  If “Letters to Mao” creates a metaphorical space for exploration and investigation out of language and paper, then “House A; Geometry B” might be said to further this aim by reminding the reader of the physical space occupied by language itself. Evoking echo and location, architecture and geometry, and, of course, house and home, Cheng creates in the book’s second sequence a sort of dictionary of definitions out of concrete images that serve to make the intangible tangible. But these definitions — the poetry is divided into sections preceded by each letter of the alphabet — don’t necessarily serve to divide one entry from another. Rather these entries create correspondences. As “House A; Geometry B” evokes a “house of seamed structure, / unseaming an undetermined space,” where the speaker/author wishes to “construct, say, a physical / manifestation of an interior state” and to “build a house to locate ourselves,” it also creates relationships between noun/concepts such as “father” and “water” and “sleep” and geometrical shapes such as “convex polyhedra” and “heptagon” and “nonagon.” In doing so, Cheng creates a blueprint out of drafted lines, and these lines manage to expand and constrict simultaneously. Because even as the speaker of these poems works within space to both establish and question location, this speaker lives, after all, on/in a particular plane of existence. As Cheng writes: “a body orbits; pathways between / furniture form a constellatory map. / corollary lines by which we hinge and / unhinge ourselves to corner lamplight, / flaxen wallpaper, a remembrance of / water pipes.” As we move through our lives, and through the world we inhabit, Cheng seems to be arguing, we are nonetheless tethered to the specific places, not only of our pasts and presents, but constantly re/making ourselves, and our spaces, within those contexts, in our presents and futures. But just how do we do this?

  Language, or the sounds a language makes, comes to play here as well, as the body attempts to locate itself within space, even as space remains somewhat untraceable. Cheng writes: “enumerated imprecision, like counting / the way an echo divides into lights and / breaks.” “Reverberations of form, texture, directionality” also appear in this sequence, as does “not the lost house, not the forgotten / house, but the house of echoes.” The sequence ends with:

  the body of articulation occurs through

  a house.

  “possible [metrics]: contact zone,

  borderlands. language in construction

  of multiple histories.”

  let us iterate it until it is its own

  baseline. dislocation as house. longing as

  location.

  Here, Cheng’s use of the verb ‘iterate,’ which evokes a process of creating multiple versions, versions which may or may not be compatible with each other, serves to remind the reader that home-building (whether in a literal or metaphorical sense), or any sort of space creation at all, is not a static occurrence but an ever-continuing process, in this case bound in longing — perhaps we can view this longing, within the wider scope of House A, as a longing connected to immigration — where the longing for house/home becomes the space itself.

  °

  1: your language of intimacy and the slant of

  afternoon stratosphere 2: the study of how species

  space themselves with respect to one another 3: if

  sound had a surface, if language measured distance,

  if the body was a metaphor for everything unsaid 4:

  home-based sense of identity 5: interacting with

  intimates 6: fossilization, one’s language cut

  transversely and encased in time and atmosphere 7:

  when I listen to someone speak, the vibration of

  my own body 8: bone language

  (from “How to Build an American Home”)

  In “How to Build an American Home,” the final sequence of House A, the reader encounters an essayistic project that combines writing from the place of and about home, and more specifically, the concept of home as the daughter of immigrants, paired with black and white illustrations — aerial photographs, heavenly bodies, geometric and botanical drawings, x-rays, blueprints, and more. As the illustrations work to ground the writing within the wide scope of life on earth, as well as earth’s view into the solar system, the accompanying written passages serve to bind the reader to the specifics of home formation within language. What we start to encounter, as we move through the sequence, is the concept that the titular house of the collection is as much a human body, moving, living, existing through and within time, personal circumstances, and space, as it is any sort of sheltering structure built to house that body.

  Elsewhere in the sequence we find: “A house is a body; it is not permeable. // Inside, we grow a forest of moon, marsh, bird. Outside, the world / looms large and flat as a paper hole in the ceilingspace.” Taking “a house is a body” literally may be a risk, but considering that Cheng also writes of house/ home in relation to “membrane” (“To say home is a whole that keeps us / apart from others; / a membrane cannot help insulating distance — “), “skin” (“In the shadow we have splintered, the skin is a curve / only I can gather, the weave of the grain only I can bear.”), and “anatomy” (“Children of those who parachute in / go about their days collecting answers to questions not yet posed: the creak / of a house breaking, a ritual of numbers, sound anatomy of her mother’s call…”), we may want to consider that at least a metaphorical bridge between dwelling and the body that dwells (in space, in language) is being forged.

  That “How to Build an American Home” also concerns itself with a relationship to parents (specifically, immigrant parents who may be having their own issues with language, a subject that “How to Build an American Home” glosses in a few pages of beautiful, lucid poetry), who engender both the physical body of their child and provide for the shelter and environment of that body (“We will always hold those who kept us in the world / before we could fall out again.”) only seems to add to this possibility.

  Here, and throughout House A, Jennifer S. Cheng engages with the twin concepts of house and home as she navigates both internal and external terrain to create a poetry that is as engaging as it is intelligent, that is both wide in scope even as it is tethered to specific circumstances related to being the daughter of immigrants, and that invites the reader to investigate their own spaces, their own origins, and the structures and concepts with which they order and populate their lives.

• Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2016/11/house-a-by-jennifer-s-cheng/
  Word count: 1047

  QUOTED: "What Jennifer S. Cheng’s House A provides is a gripping narrative."
  "Through this collage of tightly hewn images, anecdotal gestures, and the suspension of engrossing narrative tension, Cheng has constructed a poetic narrative that is as powerful as it is sparse. The success of Cheng’s book lies in its ability to render those ephemeral moments that exist solely in the negative space of what remains unsaid."

  HOUSE A BY JENNIFER S. CHENG
  REVIEWED BY KIM LIAO

  November 25th, 2016

  As a prose writer, I depend on poetry to wake me up, slow me down, and get me thinking about the music of language. I respect poetry for its images and sounds, and while it is not my medium of expression, I find reading poetry to be restorative and rejuvenating. Yet what I don’t expect from the genre—and what Jennifer S. Cheng’s House A provides—is a gripping narrative.

  A poetry collection constructed from three disparate yet harmonious parts, House A concerns itself with identity-building, diaspora, and the physical act of building a home and an immigrant family on foreign soil. Yet while these are familiar themes, Cheng defamiliarizes them for the reader through her refractory poems that have the effect of a kaleidoscope, dividing experiences into tiny crystalline slivers and re-assembling them to illustrate the unexpected colors and shapes that lie buried within everyday domestic life.

  In the first section, “Letters to Mao,” we hear the clear voice of a first-person speaker anchoring us to a specific point of view. Yet lest we take the voice too literally, Cheng traverses time and space in prose poems that gently defy our expectations of historical personal narratives and interrogate the epistolary form even as they echo it. Her poems accrue with the steady precision of bricks laying the foundation both of the “home” in question and of the book:

  Dear Mao,
  To say your name plainly, as if you were a man of History I knew so well. My uncle as a twenty-year-old in prison, whispering, only it wasn’t a whisper but a drunken fury, They’re trading children, do you understand? Everyone is starving. I have no way of knowing if what he said is true, so why should history be so unreliable was what I asked myself. You in your stone peasant house by the wet fields. You attending primary school with the other village children. You running away at age eleven, believing the next town over was only footsteps away. You were dust in my house. A shadow underneath the floorboards.

  By addressing him directly, the speaker makes Mao a specter in the book—both god and mortal man, both question and answer about how history originates. Writing to Mao is a means of confronting the forces of history, both those that oppress and those that offer unforeseen opportunities. He is the reason why people are forced from their country and must find a new one, but he is also the spark that alights the speaker’s family in their new home. These inquiries illustrate the struggle of the speaker’s attempts to reconcile herself with her current vantage point in history, straddling two continents and cultures.

  The point of view shifts in the middle section, “House A; Geometry B,” to one of more abstract interrogations. What is space? What populates a home? How do the angles of wooden rafters create a roof over a space where all of the dramas of a life play out?

  If anything, this section of the book is the least narrative-driven, and injects an interesting sensation of space into the book. It acts as a sort of interlude, a taxonomical categorization of the dimensions of a home, of the anatomy of a family, and de-familiarizes us yet again from these spaces that we have learned to take for granted. For example:

  X
  suppose an attic is where the history of a
  past is stored away. in the absence of a
  partition, this house is everywhere the
  angle of that apex, spread as an
  umbrella, a roof in the truest sense.

  let us define nostalgia, then, not as a
  remembrance but a feeling, familial,
  that is on a precipice, vulnerable to the
  winds, drifting and swelling for a nest.

  jenniferscheng

  In my opinion the final section, “How to Build an American Home,” is the most successful, because it is also the most expansive. If the first two sections form the foundation and framework of the book, this section expands both the narrative perspective and the thematic reach—extending it beyond the confines of a single structure to encompass an omniscient exploration of what it takes to build not one but several homes over the course of a lifetime.

  The poems in the final section have the most variety in subject matter and tone, and are set off by haunting and beautiful images that interrogate the reader’s own understanding of what a home and a family is. Here’s one excerpt:

  heisenberg uncertainty principle:

  No one told me how to mark the gaps between us, how to
  compensate for them in the first place.
  _______________No one told me that if I left, there would always
  _______________be a reason to return.

  The poems in this section really made me think, as a prose writer, about how poetry can blow open our understandings of how narrative is constructed. I read this book obsessively, like I would devour a great thriller or a decadent meal of language. It made me think about how an economy of language demands that the reader enter the spaces left by writing with their own imaginative leaps. Through this collage of tightly hewn images, anecdotal gestures, and the suspension of engrossing narrative tension, Cheng has constructed a poetic narrative that is as powerful as it is sparse. The success of Cheng’s book lies in its ability to render those ephemeral moments that exist solely in the negative space of what remains unsaid.

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-63243-023-6
  Word count: 259

  QUOTED: "elegiac debut"
  "The poems are delicate and dexterous, with Cheng juxtaposing diasporic history with childhood memory."

  House A
  Jennifer Cheng. Omnidawn, $17.95 trade paper (400p) ISBN 978-1-63243-023-6

  In her elegiac debut, Cheng, winner of the 2015 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize, excavates the nostalgic ephemera of the immigrant home. The poems are delicate and dexterous, with Cheng juxtaposing diasporic history with childhood memory. Through eloquent stitching of a childhood dream, she resurrects an estranged home’s haunting air: “You were dust in my house. A shadow underneath the floorboards.” Anchored by the language of dislocation, each poem stands out as a courageous attempt to find what is imagined as home. Cheng translates the idea of home into a wholly new narrative, asking, “If the birds of history alight by a ritual of body and landscape, do they make the return out of longing, out of heartache?” The language of diaspora is often drowned out by a popular emphasis on historical language, but Cheng’s poetry is instead an “architectural palimpsest” of immigrant longing. In three sections—“Dear Mao,” “House A; Geography B,” and “How to Build an American Home”—Cheng utilizes the markers of immigrant language sparingly and demonstrates how that experience is more than history. In this house history is hidden, but shadows every line: “an immigrant is like this: cirrus, circular, circulate.” Cheng’s poems are a “layer of skin” that she is “inclined to peel”—a litany that takes the reader closer to the marrow. (Oct.)

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