Crevasse

Nicholas Wong, 1979-

Book - 2015

'Crevasse, Nicholas Wong's newest collection of poetry, 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. Crevasse collects poems that seek to uncover the seam connecting these mutually observed and observing bodies. Written in English, Wong's second language after Cantonese, these meticulously wrought poems achieve a careful de-familiarization of language - its reliance on sound and sense and the painstaking, word-by-word accrual of meaning - to both enact and exemplify the irreducible persistence of the body through illness, dislocated... desires, and colonization. Like Samuel Beckett and others before him, Wong has deliberately chosen to write in a non-native language - a decision that frees him to strip down, interrogate, and ultimately reorient the fragmented complexities of the multiple marked communities he inhabits: queer, Asian, Hong Kong native, poet, reader, lover. The results are a stunning array of poems, both lyric and experimental, which seek to lay bare the gap between perfect familiarity and inevitable distance - "The layered self/ on a plate,/ slain by silver-/ware."-- more