Monsters I Have Been

by Kenji C. Liu

Overview

Using an invented poetry method called frankenpo (frankenstein poetry), Liu takes existing texts and remixes them, creating multi-faceted poems that investigate the relationship between toxic masculinity and forms of violence plaguing our modern society. It also explores the male-male erotic and marginalized masculinities that are urgently needed as a counterweight to today's dominant hypermasculinity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938584985
Publisher:	Alice James Books
Publication date:	04/16/2019
Pages:	100
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Kenji C. Liu (劉謙司) is author of Map of an Onion, national winner of the 2015 Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize. His poetry is in American Poetry Review, Action Yes!, Apogee, Barrow Street, The Feminist Wire,The Progressive, The Rumpus, The Volta, Split This Rock’s poem of the week series, several anthologies, and two chapbooks, Craters: A Field Guide (2017) and You Left Without Your Shoes (2009). A Kundiman fellow and an alumnus of VONA/Voices, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and the Community of Writers, he lives in Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

02/25/2019

Liu’s second book confronts a range of subjects, among them “government sponsored fascism,” god, and love. Though thematically various, the book strives for formal unity, as each poem is written using the same generative process. Of this “frankenpo,” Liu writes that he aims to “create a new poetic text by collecting, disaggregating, randomizing, rearranging, recombining, erasing, and reanimating one or more chosen bodies of text, for the purpose of divining or revealing new meanings often at odds with the original texts.” Reminiscent of Yedda Morrison’s Darkness, which transforms Conrad’s Heart of Darkness into an ecopoetics text, Liu’s work posits appropriation, chance, and juxtaposition as ways of transforming the injustices of an imperialistic language. In “Empire Strikes,” he writes: “Great ears of the people stolen, deathly half governors, and bureaucracy, that unstoppable depletion.” Liu’s poems strive to reclaim agency by making the language of the colonizers serve values at odds with its politics. Liu relishes the absurd and the happenstance, that “tornado gorgeous” that becomes possible with a non-utilitarian approach to language. While the project proves conceptually compelling, some readers may find the execution lacking as this writing process often fails to reveal meaning or transformation beyond seemingly random juxtapositions: “Activate interlocks. Dyna-therms connected. I could leap through a fruity pebble donut.” As Liu himself writes, “Together we are a pair of lonely questions.” (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Kenji Liu’s Monsters I Have Been writhes knotty tentacles through textual boneyards, disturbing screenplays, theoretical works, and literatures in their coffined-off sleeps. What it draws back are parts through which the poet might, as Lucille Clifton wrote, make up 'a kind of life' in the global slaughterhouse of heteropatriarchy and racism. Sharp, protean, dexterous, and discontent—Liu’s collection shows where the bodies have been buried, and that many won’t stay dead. No doubt, this book is alive as all hell.” —Douglas Kearney “The monstrosity of the times speak to us through filmscripts, internet writings, faux-apologies, divinations, public utterances, and savage declarations that hit from all directions—letting us know that the patriarchal, capitalist, heteronormative inheritance of poetry no longer suffices to meet the demands of the day. Gone is the poet’s singular voice, the poetic transmission from muse or god or anguished affect. These frankenpos, as Kenji Liu calls them, arise from the thick and twitching mass of language constantly exploding between our ears—the overflow is rebellious, unapologetic, multilingual, and fierce.” —Sawako Nakayasu “In his book Monsters I Have Been, Kenji Liu offers the franken-po(em) as swarm, as a reterritorialization of the border, of the montage, of the assemblage, a series of sensuous, disorienting confrontations. Gravities, sinkholes, craters, and other forms of post-slippage encounter grass, tide, fish and other types of undulations. The symphonic, multilingual, multi-signage aspect of Monsters I Have Been allows for the question of what are you to be asked again and again, through different veils and performances of blur, innocence, and aggression. Read this spectacular, sexy book because it is a sublime, dusky love letter to our resurrections and our de/formations, ‘Deep earlight, you could be fuel for gender thievery.’” — 신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin, author most recently of Unbearable Splendor

From the Publisher