I've lived in a landlocked state for most of my life, so the octopus in this poem is a deviation for me. Its postpartum death spiral was one impulse for the piece; the second was a missed miscarriage. For several weeks, I carried my dead daughter inside my body. I wanted the poem to contend with the strange tension of being a living container for remains.
Stefanie Kirby on "Ruptures" |
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Jaye Chen Reviews Steven Duong’s At the End of the World There Is a Pond"
"Duong’s poetic voice is always shape-shifting. The collection is divided in four sections: the jumpers, the swimmers, the sinkers, the floaters. Types of fish, yes, but also types of ways to live in relation to those bodies of water we call trauma and history. Within the collection, new structures arise on top of another: in each section, we find a poem titled 'Novel' that traces the composition of a novel in different stages, an ode to rappers in different years of the Chinese zodiac, and travel poems through Vietnam and China."
viaLOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS |
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What Sparks Poetry: Carol Moldaw on Drafts
"In many ways, this draft marks the end of my blind groping and the beginning of the poem proper. Nothing I’d written up to that point had caught my poetic interest linguistically; my thoughts, preoccupations, and perceptions had been floating around without substance or anchor. In this draft though, images began to coalesce, and the lines develop a distinctive voice—the poem’s voice." |
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