Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

As an experimental poet I am drawn to the materiality of language as a medium of desire, of longing. Every sentence carries a cavernous silence, yawning for something beyond itself that is just out of reach. Though I have always addressed the search for language amidst sites of silence—History and the archives, immigrant home-building, the feminine monstrous, the interior wilderness—my recent work has been drawn into other modes of elusive articulation such as asemic writing, mixed media textile books, and “poetic rituals.” These forms honor the silence of what is unsayable or unknowable while suggesting that “language has a body, and the body has a language.” Rather than adhering to conventional conceptions of meaning-making and legibility, they examine the underlying primordial desire of language, the texturality of text.

While At Headlands

While at the Headlands, I am interested in deepening my investigation of the entanglement of language + body + landscape. I grew up in multiple geographies between diasporas, amid a shifting web of overlapping linguistic atmospheres, only some of which were decipherable to me; my experience of language was often textural, sensate as much as semantic. I am interested in blurring the geographic and linguistic, exterior and interior realities, ecological and corporeal syntaxes, in searching out an alternative, speculative language—one that is immigrant and emigrant, home and un-home. What topographies are created as one arranges the material “debris” of one’s environment into “utterances” by way of ephemeral, recursive, embodied processes?

Selected Works

Letters to Mao, House A (Omnidawn, 2016)

How to Build an American Home, House A (Omnidawn, 2016)

Toward a Poetics of Phantom Limb, Or All the Shadows that Carry Us, The Lyric
Essay as Resistance, ed. Zoë Bossiere & Erica Trabold (Wayne State University Press,
2023)

from (Text)ile Asemic Book [1], A Mouth Holds Many Things: a De-Canon Hybrid-
Literary Collection, ed. Dao Strom & Jyothi Natarajan (Fonograf Editions, 2024)