Togetherness

by Wo Chan

Overview

WINNER of the 2023 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature

Finalist for the Firecracker Award for Poetry!  

A debut poetry collection in which non-binary poet and drag performer Wo Chan recounts stories from their queer childhood and adolescence.

Togetherness sends out sparks from its electric surface, radiating energy and verve from within its deep and steady emotional core: stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant, culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads weave together monologue, soaring lyric descants, and document, taking the positions of apostrophe, biography, and soulful plaint to stage a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is drag—at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643621449
Publisher:	Nightboat Books
Publication date:	09/20/2022
Pages:	88
Sales rank:	707,114
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Wo Chan who performs as The Illustrious Pearl is a poet and drag artist. They are a winner of the 2020 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of TOGETHERNESS (2022). Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Poets House, and Lambda Literary. Their poems appear in POETRY, WUSSY, Mass Review, No Tokens, and The Margins. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts and elsewhere. They are a regular at Sasha Velour’s Nightgowns and have starred in short films and music videos, featured in documentaries, and performed at cabarets and clubs across the US. They are currently the Communications Manager of Lambda Literary and the Editor of the Lambda Literary Review. They live in Brooklyn, NY. Find them at @theillustriouspearl.

Table of Contents

Performing miss america at bushwig 2018, then chilling 1

SUCH AS 3

I pissed on a red christmas 4

What makes you possible? In its premiere 5

Flat on your back, you are obsessed 6

My mother's face 7

@nature, i avoid you 8

Your first apartment in New York, you tried 9

I think about my mother and just begin to cry 10

My life with newly painted nails is well 11

Darkness that is both early and late 13

What do i make of my face / except 14

The bobadome, lunar new year party with vincent 17

In college you tried to get an Adderall prescription 18

Scott Conant, restaurateur and master of Italian culinary arts 19

@nature, you're gross 20

@nature, how well do you know america? 22

Yesterday, you took a shit so big at the office 24

The month you continued to ponder 25

@nature, teach me things 27

@nature, when you ripped 29

I wish i could wake up and make a sincere apology 31

Danny's back dips like a showroom divan 33

Reading the Yelp reviews of your family's restaurant-a mistake 34

@nature, you are loved. 35

The shoes 37

My Brother is a Dreamboat 39

Where can you harmlessly place your devotion? for what faint idea of a dream would you lift a flag? 40

Ahem. She informs you 41

All your potatoes on the ground-you were not meant for this 42

@nature who's willing 45

August Moments 47

Perched below someone, you are escalating 48

Hair greased with the scent of bacon and five spice 49

It's pride month 51

The habits of your life simply become your life 52

Plank, plank, plank; forest 53

I'm so glad i got to see you 54

@nature… 56

Years Flow By Like Water 60

Tender Buffet 63

"People Like You More Than You Know" 67

The smiley barista remembers my name 69

Audition 70

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/15/2022

This refreshing debut gathers its power by exploring the overlaps between gender, sex, language, and nationality. Chan’s speaker draws on the language of the body and the details of an immigrant experience to reveal what cannot easily be categorized. A snapshot of their family’s Chinese restaurant becomes not only a space for autobiography, but an inventory of polyphonic democracy: “mid-life Caucasians, stoned truants, strange dates, Black worship,/ beige infant, the red hat society, gray bouffant, heavy demanding rings,/ and my own family, each face distilled in the steamtable mirror.” Chan, a drag performer, is equally adept at the kind of linguistic play that challenges the absurdity of fixed categories: “I said field of thyme/ with an ‘h’/ as in yew-man & yew-bris & yew-mid/ as in yewman yewbris in the yewmid afterrain heat.” Throughout this vivid and surprising work, Chan intersperses unattributed letters in support of their family’s immigration efforts, further destabilizing the boundaries between speaker and audience, individual and collective. Daring and original, Chan’s poetry collapses categories to create inspired art. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"This refreshing debut gathers its power by exploring the overlaps between gender, sex, language, and nationality. [...] Daring and original, Chan’s poetry collapses categories to create inspired art."—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Wo Chan’s remarkable debut collection puts in tension memories of the diaspora as the poems move between childhood, the family restaurant, and a racist immigration system that demands exceptionality and authenticity."—Orchid Tierney, Jacket2

"Togetherness is a poetry collection I recommend to all who love poetry or memoir—or both. Its narrative thread follows the search for love and acceptance, both from outside and from within, and it offers a refreshing and deeply intimate experience from those not often given a voice."—Bella Dalton, International Examiner

"At the red-hot, glittering core of Wo Chan’s explosive debut Togetherness is the intersection of the foul and the forlorn. [...] Togetherness is not a study of restraint, but a joyous, unruly recreation of life’s big and small (melo)dramas."—Madeleine Poole, storySouth

"Togetherness is a restless collection, brimming with forms new and old, some prose-y and others firmly poetic, and all eclectic. Most of all, it’s a searching debut by a poetic voice that is as many parts scatological as it is experimental; as saucy as it is ebullient and sincere, as elided as it is overflowing."—Sarah Sukardi, Soapberry Review

"There’s much to talk about in Wo Chan’s work, much to love, and much to look forward to in future poems that are yet to be written by this beautiful poet. Togetherness is word art, a gift given to us by a very generous poet."—Judy Ireland, South Florida Poetry Journal

"This is a vibrant, critical and loving collection, one that startles through both the strength and vulnerabilities displayed throughout Chan’s glorious, tender and occasionally wild performance."—rob mclennan

"A glamor clown for love and art, diaspora and desire, Wo Chan's brave exuberance, their mercurial surfaces and depths both, line for line seem to say, 'What is a heart for if you can't put sequins on it, or glue gun it to your sleeve, or wipe your nose?' Wo Chan's poetry and performances have sustained me for years, a favorite source of pleasure, solace, disruption, accountability, community—for years I have wanted this book and here it is now, the poems have gathered for their sublime cabaret. Nothing I could say would prepare you, except maybe an invitation: pick up this bright masterpiece, it is your turn to experience this love."—Alexander Chee

"Every poem is a mouthful of meat, music and memory. These poems are vulnerable and resilient, fluid and focused. A versatile and verbal poetics—an inimitable Wo Channess anchors these narratives of personal, cultural, and sexual survival. It is possible to live (on poetry) in a country that tries to kill you. The evidence is in every Wo Chan poem."—Terrance A. Hayes

"It’s no easy feat to tell the truth, nakedly (or at least in a rhinestoned nude illusion)...and Wo does it with so much style, humor, and emotion that it always breaks your heart (and heals it all over again.)  Get ready to sob, laugh hysterically, nod knowingly, stop in your tracks and go back and reread it from the start! Give it up for the unparalleled gift that is Wo Chan!"—Sasha Velour

"Wo Chan’s debut hurtles past any praise I can heap on it. Acutely aware of the cruelty of the nation-state and of the exhilarating splendor of drag, Chan’s language—razor sharp, captivating—refuses to demure, to clarify. A wide range of formal approaches and a structure that’s sheer genius troubles assumptions, disrupts notions of 'togetherness.' I will be teaching this book."—Eduardo C. Corral

"This is a poet unafraid to tackle the tacky and the tasty; the gutter and glitter—those grand parallels of a life made for or and on the margins. In linguistic loop de loops—some delightful, others terrifying—Wo Chan perceives an America we can now easily recognize from a poet who suffers the wounds, but wants them healed."—Patricia Spears Jones

From the Publisher