Spooks

by Stella Yin-Yin Wong

Overview

Stella Wong’s debut book of poems playfully subverts and willfully challenges any notions we might have about Asian Americanness and its niceties. While her previous chapbook stunned her admirers and adherents into an almost fawning incredulity, this outing eviscerates. More like getting struck with Chinese stars right between the eyes. TKO with a mean left hook to boot. And if you manage to get back up on your feet again, if your dare dance around in the haunted ring that American poetry is, be certain that this most un-model minority bard will teach you not to ever read the same way again. Or as Danez Smith has extolled: “Stella Wong wields the kind of weaponry I live to be slayed by. Funny as hell, delightfully strange and full of a sneaky and giant heart, this book will knock the windows of your heart not just open, but out the frame once you see how far Wong can dive into fear and the terrible possibles of humanness can still carry back something like hope, gooder than joy.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947817388
Publisher:	Saturnalia Books
Publication date:	03/15/2022
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Stella Wong is the author of Spooks, winner of the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize, and American Zero, selected for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize by Danez Smith. A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Wong’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Colorado Review, Lana Turner, Bennington Review, the LA Review of Books, and more.

Table of Contents

Pineapple 3

Who'd Rob God? 7

Fu ER Dai

Bandaids Didn't Make a Color for Me, or Thinking Inside the Box, or Crayon within the Lines 8

Pomelo 12

Not Your Bernini's Daphne 14

Pyramid Scheme 17

Everything about You Is Offensive Except Your Cat 19

Bye Bye 21

One Child Policy is the Party Pickup Line 23

Antimatter 25

Search Engine 26

Modes of Production 32

How Can You Tell If It's Ripe Yet? 33

Go Big or Go Home 35

To Bear False Whiteness 38

When the Still Breathing Watch the Stillborn 40

Buddha Discovers Reincarnation and Reaches Nirvana under the Fig Tree's Heart-Shaped Leaves 43

Multiple Worlds Interpretation 46

Oregon 1945 47

Outside Party Lines 50

While I'm Not a Heroic Couplet 52

Quid Pro Nil 54

Halloween 56

To Scare Men 58

Nanjing 1937-38 59

Advocacy 61

Halloween Redux 62

Matryoshka 66

Deportation 67

The Sign for Power 69

Spooks 72

Pidgin 82

Acknowledgements 84