Wong, Jane 2023
My grandmother said it was going to be long—as long as you can hold your lineage—depending on how long you can hold your tongue—as long as your tongue can wrap around the pit—of some stolen stone fruit—as long as you can hide your pitter-patter face—glued in sun-split splinters—lengthening shadows as long as your face—longing to be mirrored back—back to your daughter your mother your grandmother—freckle by freckle—furnished forever across—the long loaming haul—
– Jane Wong, “The Long Labors”
Watch Jane Wong’s 2023 reading at the Chicago Poetry Center:
Jane Wong begins at 49:52 minutes.
Check out Jane Wong’s work in “The Poetics of Haunting in Asian American Poetry,” a digital humanities project:
The Poetics of Haunting in Asian American Poetry
A poetics of haunting insists on invocation: a deliberate, powerful, and provocative move toward haunted places. How does history – particularly the history of war, colonialism, and marginalization – impact the work of Asian American poets across time and space? How does language act as a haunting space of intervention and activism?
I was waiting for something
to arrive. I didn’t know what.
Something buoyed, something
sun knocked. I placed my palms
up, little pads of butter, expecting.
All day, nothing. Longer than
that. My hair grew, fell out,
grew. Outside my window, I felt
the flick of a tail in September
wind. A bobcat sauntered across
the grass before me, the black tip
of its tail a pencil I’d like to sharpen.
– Jane Wong, “The Waiting”
Watch musician Audrey Nuna read Jane Wong’s poem “I Put on My Fur Coat” for The New York Times Style Magazine:
Video: Read T a Poem | Audrey Nuna
The singer and rapper reads the poem “I Put on My Fur Coat” (2021) by Jane Wong.
