fb pixcode

POETRY

PUBLISHER
Kaya Press

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 6 x 7.75 in. / 80 pgs / 4 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2015 p. 174   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781885030207 TRADE
List Price: $15.95 CDN $22.50 GBP £13.99

AVAILABILITY
In stock

TERRITORY
WORLD

THE SPRING 2024 ARTBOOK | D.A.P. CATALOG

Artbook | D.A.P. Catalog Cover Link
Preview our Spring 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
  

KAYA PRESS

Crevasse

By Nicholas Wong.

Crevasse, Hong Kong–based writer Nicholas Wong's newest collection of poetry, which won the 2016 Lamda Literary Award, starts with an epigraph from Maurice Merleau-Ponty that notes the impossibility of observing one's own physical body and, therefore, the necessity of a "second," "unobservable" body from which to view one's own. The poems in Crevasse seek to uncover the thread connecting these mutually observed and observing bodies. Like Samuel Beckett and others before him, Wong has deliberately chosen to write in a non-native language—English, his second language after Cantonese. Freed from the assumptions and conventions of his mother tongue, Wong strips down, interrogates and ultimately reorients the fragmented complexities of the multiple communities he inhabits—queer, Asian, poet, reader, lover—in a collection of poems that exposes the gap between familiarity and the inevitable distance of the body.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS

Los Angeles Review of Books

Maggie Trapp

Crevasse is a gathering of poems that startle in the insistent way they play with memory, history, form, and the expectations we as readers bring to poems. These lines are invested in sentiment as well as intellect. Readers are invited to both feel and think in ways that create a dis-ease, in ways that push against expectations, in ways that challenge comfort. Wong writes in a seemingly causal, confessional, even glib voice about experiences and memories that discomfit us. The assistant poetry editor for Drunken Boat, Wong writes of bodies and antibodies, of Hong Kong and the Queen of England, of sexual awakenings, of race, of desire, of what we might see and know through the body, of politics as well as the erotic, of mourning and loss.

Asian American Literary Review

Liz Meley

. . . Experimenting with a mixture of humor and pathos, the conceptual and the conversational, Wong circles solitude, the emotion perhaps best understood through invocations of absence.There is the impression a body leaves behind on a bed, a dramatic gap or hole in our lives, a hole through which we fall. Not only does Crevasse beg to be read, and read aloud, and read repeatedly, but as it embodies disturbance, desire, love, and loss, Crevasse demands to be inhabited: the gap closes, if only for as long as the book remains open, solid in your hands.

Cha: An Asian Literary Journal

Michael Tsang

After reading Crevasse, I reread my review of Wong's debut collection, Cities of Sameness. I wrote that his poems were like statues of Greek gods, sculpted without a spare ounce of fat, and I stand by this observation. Wong's works combine free verse with rigorously carved stanzas, often in couplets and triplets, meticulously versed. This, however, does not mean there has been no development in Wong's poetics. While Cities exhibited experimentation with poetic forms, Crevasse shows more preference for certain forms and motifs. There are three poems named "Private Parts," three named "Self-Portraits" and three structured as one-line stanzas, each starting with a Ginsbergian fixed base (such as "how" or "if"). Wong's diction is as precise as ever, although in Crevasse he often uses somewhat dated vocabulary to add layers of meanings to his language. Not only are the poems top-notch, but even the book's design is so impeccable - the cover, colour scheme, typeface and editing all seem right - that it is like holding a work of art, an elaborate manifestation of aesthetics.

Kenyon Review

Dean Rader

I imagine pronouncing Nicholas Wong’s new book “cruh-VASS,” with the emphasis on the second syllable. That seems more poetic to me. However, Wong doesn’t really need my help; Crevasse is leaking poetry. An exploration of bodies, cities, and the rifts within them, Crevasse looks at the tiny cracks that break along the borders of public and private selves. Take a look at the opening lines of the opening poem, “Private Parts: Anti-Bodies,” and you’ll see what I mean

Crevasse

in stock  $15.95


Free Shipping

UPS GROUND IN THE CONTINENTAL U.S.
FOR CONSUMER ONLINE ORDERS

FORTHCOMING AND NEW: FICTION AND POETRY

A Song of Flowers: Ni Xochitl, Ni Kuikatl

A SONG OF FLOWERS: NI XOCHITL, NI KUIKATL

JBE Books

ISBN: 9782365680844
USD $50.00
| CAN $72

Pub Date: 4/16/2024
Active | In stock


I Will Not Go

I WILL NOT GO

Kaya Press

ISBN: 9781935717003
USD $18.95
| CAN $27.95 UK £ 14.99

Pub Date: 6/25/2024
Forthcoming


I ask about what falls away

I ASK ABOUT WHAT FALLS AWAY

Kaya Press

ISBN: 9781885030894
USD $17.95
| CAN $27.95 UK £ 13.99

Pub Date: 3/12/2024
Active | In stock


Gudrun Scholz: No Fat Poetry

GUDRUN SCHOLZ: NO FAT POETRY

Kerber

ISBN: 9783735609434
USD $80.00
| CAN $115

Pub Date: 3/26/2024
Active | In stock


Is This The Way The Universe Works?

IS THIS THE WAY THE UNIVERSE WORKS?

Set Margins' publications

ISBN: 9789083318882
USD $22.00
| CAN $31

Pub Date: 12/5/2023
Active | In stock


The Spinster's Poems

THE SPINSTER'S POEMS

Karma Books, New York

ISBN: 9781949172973
USD $25.00
| CAN $37 UK £ 21

Pub Date: 11/28/2023
Active | In stock


Secret Poetics

SECRET POETICS

Soberscove Press/Winter Editions

ISBN: 9781940190327
USD $24.00
| CAN $34.5 UK £ 22

Pub Date: 11/14/2023
Active | In stock


The Archaeology of Eros

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF EROS

Dark Entries Editions

ISBN: 9798985170412
USD $20.00
| CAN $29 UK £ 18

Pub Date: 10/3/2023
Active | In stock


A Very Large Array

A VERY LARGE ARRAY

DABA

ISBN: 9781734681796
USD $35.00
| CAN $50.5 UK £ 30

Pub Date: 12/19/2023
Active | In stock


The Dice Cup

THE DICE CUP

Wakefield Press

ISBN: 9781939663863
USD $19.95
| CAN $26.95 UK £ 16.95

Pub Date: 12/6/2022
Active | In stock


Concrete Poetry

CONCRETE POETRY

MAMCO Geneva

ISBN: 9781636810423
USD $29.95
| CAN $39.95 UK £ 23.99

Pub Date: 5/3/2022
Active | In stock


Permutations

PERMUTATIONS

DABA

ISBN: 9781734681772
USD $20.00
| CAN $27 UK £ 18

Pub Date: 4/12/2022
Active | In stock