Books
A collection of oblique letters to Mao, ‘dream-geometry’ poems, and image-text experiments, House A seeks to render the immersive yet porous experience of an immigrant home’s entanglement of histories: personal history, familial history, and History. How is the body inscribed with a cosmology of home and vice versa?
…an exquisite exploration…to make apparent the illusive tone and mood of an upbringing—its porousness relative to history, myth, and location. Not since Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family and Calvino’s Invisible Cities have I encountered such attention to the construction of love and love’s capacity to transform unimagined locations.
—Claudia Rankine
Winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize * PEN Hong Kong “Favorite Books 2016”
This hybrid assemblage of myth, poetry, and memoir writes into the voices and stories of various women in Chinese mythology, in order to uncover shadow stories of feminine monstrosity. MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems explores bewilderment and shelter, destruction and construction, unthreading as it rethreads, shedding as it collects.
What are the secret aspects of a book, which cannot be spoken of and that unfold in ways that nobody can describe to us in advance? Can radical change be read as a ‘map of the body in motion’? […] If reading is a form of pilgrimage, then Cheng gives us its charnel ground events, animal conversions, guiding figures and elemental life. ‘I want to mark a new map for a body opening,’ she writes, and then she does.
—Bhanu Kapil
Winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award * Publishers Weekly “Best Books 2018”
A chapbook in which fragments of text, found images, photographs, and blank space converge to tell an intimate “narrative” of voicelessness.
To be unable to speak, to be shy, to be quiet, to be reticent, is not to be silent, or silenced--not if one listens carefully to the state of reclusion, as carefully as Jennifer S. Cheng does in her beautiful essay, in which she invokes not only the resonance of such a state, but reminds us, too, that the vocation of writing--always--is a call from within. It is a call she has clearly heard.
—Mary Ruefle
Finalist for the New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM Chapbook Contest