Jennifer Soong

Stories of True Romance

Love Stories

COMEBACK DEATH, Jennifer Soong's third book, weaves its registers of what Soong names as "dread, gender, sarcasm, sublimation of fruit, pain, ambition, and fecundity" through an English which is not only polyvocal but uncannily porous. Its languages (English, Russian, German, ancient Greek) underscore a perverse pastoral range that somehow bridges Oxford, New Jersey, and Lesbos. With a ferocity both musical and analytic, Soong's third book offers an unprecedented set of tonalities for immense architectures of feeling. "In COMEBACK DEATH, Jennifer Soong dramatizes one of the key problems of our time, and indeed any time, which is how to reorganize the (negative) affects structuring intersubjectivity and thus conditioning our capacity to act in a common interest among others."--Thom Donovan Poetry.

Comeback Death

Swaying between command and curiosity, acquiescence and destruction, distance and proximity, Jennifer Soong's Suede Mantis / Soft Rage proffers tenderness that teeters on the precipice of loss. Premised on this peril is not a paralyzing grief but a generative poiesis of "cruel desperation," in which poetry pronounces itself in contrasts and conditionals, had beens and renunciations. Like a tongue that tans flesh, like passion that's made pliable by the pulsing and glistening of language, Suede Mantis / Soft Rage is the negotiated labor of a process rather than a product, raising interior operations to the surface while presenting an antithesis to mimetic construction. Neo-romantic and post-pastoral, the poems in Soong's second collection reinvigorate lyric possibility.

Suede Mantis / Soft Rage

Jeremy Hoevenaar

Georg Trakl

Kyle Coma-Thompson

Garett Strickland

Paul Éluard

Laura Walker

Elizabeth Robinson

Vi Khi Nao

Gary J. Shipley

Róbert Gál

Vahé Godel

Serge Pey

Christine Shan Shan Hou

Je Baer

E. L. Æ. Elæ

Adam Fagin

Patricia Hartland

Heikki Huotari

M. C. Hyland

Rachel Levitsky

Clarissa Macedo

Geoffrey Olsen

Branko Ve Poljanski

Lindsey Webb

Rachael Guynn Wilson

Memory As a Morgue: Lacunae

Vestiges_05

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Art. NEAR, AT follows the inherent strangeness of one's consciousness as it observes and comes into contact with the physical world. A sustained exploration of language, capitalism, gender, and nature, NEAR, AT traverses and measures the movement of silence against the movement of thought and its pauses. Divided into five parts, each with its own form, and followed by a series of ongoing love poems called "My Christopher Poems," this debut collection is slow to assume but quick to adjust. Rooted in both the traditional and the experimental, it asks just how little of ourselves we can be. "Jennifer Soong's collection displays her nuanced understanding of how the philosophical-treatise-as-poem can birth an emotional and embodied intelligence, placing her in a line of affinity with contemporary writers such as Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Robertson and Anne Boyer."--Mia You "In these poems 'the mind is a guest,' though the bodies of reader & writer are never simply at rest, but dance on the rhythms of a language (or, better, languages) that keep teaching us new steps."--Pierre Joris "...uniquely tender: weird, wired records of affection, that daily fever."--Graham Foust "This book demonstrates a physicist's logic, like texting a friend to say you're 'at' your destination, when in actuality you are near, but in actual actuality you will be there, at the agreed-upon place, by the time they reach you."--Monica McClure

Near, at

Jennifer Soong

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