Cathy Park Hong's first book, Translating Mo'Um,
was published in 2002 by Hanging Loose Press.
Her second collection, Dance Dance Revolution,
was chosen for the Barnard women Poets Prize
and published in 2007 by W.W Norton.
Her third book of poems, Engine Empire,
was published in 2012 also by W.W Norton.
Hong is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship,
a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship,
a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship,
and a Village Voice Fellowship for minority reporters.
Her poems have been published in A Public Space, Poetry,
Paris Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney's, Harvard Review,
Boston Review, then it goes on and on,
The Nation, American Letters & Commentary.
And I'm not even going to-- and other journals, I'll say.
She's an assistant professor at Sarah Lawrence College
and is regular faculty at the Queen's MFA program
in Charlotte, North Carolina.
I first encountered Kathy's poetry
here at the Poetry Center in a class on American 21st century
poetry.
We spent time in the class sorting poets
into categories, flarf, Gurlesque conceptual poetry,
the new formalism.
That seemingly endless list of cubbyholes
we're sticking current poetry into.
Alas, Cathy Park Hong shares a cubbyhole with no one.
Her poems are ambitiously eclectic,
exploring a huge range of genres and voices of tone diction
and form, ballads fragmented, lyric poems, prose poems,
vignettes sonnet variations.
Her settings range from the Civil War West
to the digital future, from California
to a fictionalized East.
What a gift to discover a poet so surprising and mysterious.
Much of Hong's work explores borders and the difficulty
or impossibility of communicating across them,
geographical, linguistic, cultural,
borders between past, present, and future, borders of genre.
In Rain Taxi Gabriella Ekman says
that Hong takes us far beyond the borderlands of the usual
and expected.
This is language that takes no prisoners, that startles,
and threatens rather than entices language simultaneously
beautiful and furiously anti-beautiful.
Hong examines the misunderstandings and injustice
that happens where cultures collide.
The tension of living in a place both strange and familiar.
Molly Quinn in Fiddle Book Review
calls Engine Empire a terrifying study
on imperialism, which turns political and lyrical
traditions on their heads.
Well, yes, but there's also the love stories,
as in the narrator's love for the Rembrandt
painter in the Chengdu section of ancient empire.
And the father's concerned for his child
involving the use of a water pick told by the historian
in Dance Dance Revolution.
And always, always the mystery of the swim cap.
Please help me welcome Cathy Park Hong.