Saola is a highly rare and critically endangered animal endemic to the Annamite Mountains between Laos and Vietnam. Its last known sighting was in 2013, and conservationists estimate there could be fewer than one hundred remaining although it’s unknown if Saola might already be extinct. I wrote this poem to examine the unstable feeling of romanticizing an animal into myth while it is also a living and breathing (albeit endangered) creature. Saola embodies this unique dichotomy, a tenuous existence on the verge of disappearance, and one can’t help but feel connected to its otherworldly essence.
Mai Der Vang on "Otherworldly" |
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"94th Annual California Book Awards Winners"
"The Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California’s California Book Awards has selected this year’s winners for its 2025 awards. One of the oldest and most distinguished literary award programs in the nation has chosen eleven winners out of twenty-eight outstanding finalists in six categories, out of hundreds of titles submitted." Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali (Alice James Books) won Gold in Poetry, and Ward Toward by Cindy Juyoung Ok (Yale University Press) won Silver.
viaLITHUB |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Chloe Garcia Roberts on Language as Form
"I’ve always enjoyed the thought of writing as a force that could effect the inversion of that arrow, the timeline, with its incessant forward hurl. For this piece though, I wanted to attempt to use my subjective experience as a basis for objective conclusions. I dreamt about writing poems that were lightly disguised as a proofs. 'Temporal Saturation' is the first poem in Fire Eater: A Translator’s Theology, and it is the template that I used for writing the rest of the book. The first part of the poem is analytic and the second lyric but neither section can exist without each other, they are one." |
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