Lisa Chen: mouth

Year: 2007

Published by: Kaya Press

Binding: Paperback

Pages: 85

ISBN: 9781885030436

Description

Mouth, Lisa Chen’s debut collection of poetry, travels from parachute girls in Millbrae to Ezequiel the murderer at a border town, creating a cartography of geographic and bodily landscapes whose distances are measured by languages. As if wandering from place to place, Chen dabbles in different poetic forms, but always, words here confuse and betray, mouths eat and are eaten. Mouth is an elegiac love song to the mundane horrors of loss – genocide, heartbreak, revolution, exile. Yet, like Diane Arbus’ photos, Chen’s poems exude a mix of humor and pleasure, highlighting beauty in the perverse, and the perverse in the everyday. She gives voice to things that occur below the level of hearing or just beyond our notice—fragments of translated stories, unanswered bits of conversations, the mute assertiveness of a room.

About the Author

Lisa Hsiao Chen is the author of Activities of Daily Living (W.W. Norton), a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the Gotham Book Prize and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was selected by The New Yorker and Vogue as a Best Book of 2022 and as a Top 10 Book of 2022 by Publishers Weekly. Her book of poems, Mouth (Kaya Press), received an Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. She has received support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Center for Fiction, Art Omi: Writers, and Vermont Studio Center. Born in Taipei, she now lives in New York City.