They have taken
so much
I am standing
now
somewhere
at the end of a road
which leads to a beach
beside a sea
that a million ghosts
keep crossing
Patrick Rosal - Just got a draft done of my Asian Am Lit... | Facebook →
On teaching Asian American Lit for the first time
32 Essential Asian-American Writers You Need To Be Reading →
Hollywood’s (Real) Problem with the Asian Male - →
I’m a sexual being and a sexual body – and have been for a long time. I write poems from this very sexual body. Even poems that aren’t explicitly erotic (though I’ve published many) are written by me as a sexual body.
I’ve posted about this before, but we could ask the same things about fiction and poetry books. I wonder about publishers, editors, reading series curators; I wonder what their expectations of Asian male sexuality is. I’ll name four poets off the bat: Justin Chin, Joseph Legaspi, Li-Young Lee, and me. All different. All REALLY different. There is not one Asian male sexuality. How do Hollywood, the publishing industry, the art world, construct a monolithic (or absent) public expectation of Asian male sexuality? How do Asian male poets contradict those expectations outright? The poets I mention here, we are all carnal – not in the way the word is used in moral judgment – but in terms of its root: i.e. of the flesh. We are of the flesh. And as the body moves in many ways, so does the movie, the story, the poem.
APIA Writers Sign Open Letter In Support of Ferguson and Michael Brown's Family →
Among the signatories: Jessica Hagedorn, Maxine Hong Kingston, David Mura, Marilyn Chin, Larry Hajime Shinagawa, Kimiko Hahn, Juliana Chang, Elaine Kim, Hang Ong
Bitter Fruits: On Ferguson and the Ghosts of the Philippine-American War
I’ve got a new essay up over at Hyphen, a meditation on Michael Brown, Ferguson, state violence, and American imperialism. It’s also about my life as a writer of color living in a white neighborhood and my relationship to history.