煦 (Susie Zhu): 初潮 The First Tide

Year: 2021

Published by: butter*rabbit*press

Pages: 201

Binding: Sewn Bound

Printed Edition Size: 200 Stock

Description 

The First Tide is a shimmering spiral of language, or a confused collection of bilingual (English/Chinese) experimental writings.

The book was typeset and designed by 煦 (Susie Zhu) under an Aquarius full moon at the end of August 2021 in Beijing, China—to where she escaped for a 10-month-healing and her first reincarnation.

is an extremely timid and intimate book. Yet it daringly attempts at assimilating obscure contemplations and traumatic emotions in a liminal literary space between genres: it is not a neat compilation of prose and poems in two languages, but a poetic organism consists of prose, poem, [pseudo-]manifesto, translation or [un]translation.

It is an introspective (sometimes hallucinatory) study and record of time, of the process of lost and found or death and rebirth; a delicate, dreamlike flow of consciousness ruminating over this endless quest, rather than the cause or the end.

*

“The First Tide”, taken from the direct translation of 初潮 (Chu-Chao), the euphemism of menarche in Chinese, is a phrase seldom voiced, a phrase so oddly beautiful and evocative. is a poetic iteration of this undergoing of maturation, bleeding, and growth.

About the Author

煦 (Susie Zhu) is a multi-hyphenated poet-artist from China, based in Providence, RI, USA; most profoundly confused by everything including her own works, which confuse genres. She consider “book-making” as her main expressive medium, in which “book” refers to its most extensive, abstract and even obscure signification, including but not limited to: text, self-publication, artist’s book, sound/music composition, printmaking, multimedia installation, performance and video. Her “books” are encapsulated timespace for meditative and contemplative experiences, where she explores the alternatives for perception and expression.

She sees her artworks as poems and her poems exosomatic organs or flooded rooms.

It seems that 煦’s works are always enwrapped in a poetic air of quiet pensiveness, yet the audience find themselves catching a glimpse of some greater matters in their subtle breathing and trembling. 煦 sits down tenderly and thoughtfully in her works, ruminates, embraces all forms of confusion toward rigidity and “reality” and preserves them like how a dreamer records their dream. She lets her contemplations on time, being and many other obscure motifs into her “rites” (works) and have them dance mesmerizingly to the musicality of her works, spiritual but not religious. People are invited to pass by them, enter them, dream of them, forget or renounce their contour the way one who walks into the sea.