Ken Chen

Refraction as resistance (ii)

[image: Capone, Cha, Philip, Walker, Kim, Lyle] — Capone, Cha, Philip, Walker, Kim, Lyle

Some artists cannot afford to believe that aesthetics are not inextricably tied to politics. In my final post of the series, I continue summarizing the significance of artists who, in giving expression to their visions of truth and meaning, ultimately resist normative discourses by refracting status quo representations of the world.

II. Refraction as Resistance: A Poetics of Non-linear

Deviating, shifting, indirect, crooked paths, “constant state of motion, dispersion, and permeability.”

Recently in Jacket2

Near/Miss launches

Charles Bernstein

New from University of Chicago Press: paper, cloth, e-book
Audible.com has also published an audiobook of my reading of the full work.

What happened to you?: On what is lost and what is possible in exile

An Interview with Sheila Black

Jessica Suzanne Stokes

Sheila Black, a woman with dark hair and a black top smiles at the camera

In the poem, “What You Mourn,” Sheila Black twists the notion of disability as loss: the assumption that all disabled people were once nondisabled and watched their ability slip away. This assumption is found within questions often asked of disabled people such as: “What happened to you?”

Crippled they called us when I was young
later the word was disabled and then differently abled,
but those were all names given by outsiders,
none of whom could imagine
that the crooked body they spoke of,
the body, which made walking difficult
and running practically impossible,
except as a kind of dance, a sideways looping
like someone about to fall
headlong down and hug the earth, that body
they tried so hard to fix, straighten was simply mine[1]

Review of Ahmad Almallah, 'Bitter English' (Chicago, 2019)

Al Filreis

Review of Ahmad Almallah, Bitter English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 87 pp.

He stumbles as he says pretty much anything to himself — always while successfully conveying such stumbling to us. He feels that he owes everything to one place but knows that that place is “not here” - not the here of the place where he writes, not even the new “here”-ness the poem makes. How can a poet occupying the space of a page, the classic “here” where even a lost poet can call home, be alienated even from that “here”? The typical poetic existential “here I am” becomes a matter, always, of forgetting and remembering both. (It’s significant that one of the muses here is the poet’s mother, she who suffers from memory loss.)

Review of Ahmad Almallah, Bitter English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 87 pp.

Note: This review was given as an introduction to Almallah's reading at the Kelly Writers House on October 15, 2019.