Announcing: My debut poetry book

With readings forthcoming in New York, D.C., and Cleveland.

A quick announcement:

My first. We Met in Beijing is the culmination of fifteen years of living and writing in Beijing. It was a manuscript for a very long time — I alluded to it in a post last November — and now it is something I can hold and flip through. Here’s what it looks like:

Available here

The cover art is by Johanna Søvik, a Norwegian artist I met in Beijing. Go have a look at her amazing work.

This book was a long time coming. Maybe I sat on it for too long, but it can be hard to judge the exact right time to send creative nestlings into the world. (Is there ever a right time?) This Substack has actually helped spur the process. I still believe poems need time to develop, to evolve into their final forms with all their astonishing mutations, but this doesn’t need to happen in a proverbial darkroom, seen only by imagined and idealized readers. They can be allowed to grow in the light — set free, as it were. I’m ready for these poems to test their wings.

We Met in Beijing is a document of contemporary Chinese life. Several poems from this newsletter appear in it, but the majority haven’t been published. It traces Beijing’s changes from 2008 (when I arrived in the city) onwards, though there’s an emphasis on recent years. It tries to be, as David Moser puts it in a review of the book, an ongoing record “of the metabolism of the city, its circadian rhythms, the urban dopamine rush,” featuring multiple voices from different backgrounds.

The young hold milk teas
and hands, dress like
the future their grandparents
feared, ripped jeans and
crop tops

She feeds cardboard into a flame
alone in the alley corner, easy as
pressing palms together in prayer

There are many people
like me in China, without
prospect, no clue
how to be part of someone
else’s society. Dreams
are what people talk about
if they have ability and luck

Much is said about China in the media, on topics like geopolitical competition and macroeconomics and Tiktok, but less attention is given to the experience of actually being there, on the ground. I hope this collection fills in that gap a little.

How do we tell others
what it was like? What future
listener will believe
the bangers we delivered,
how fun this city can be?

And I’d like to think each poem is a capsule that contains stories that might otherwise be forgotten. This is especially true about the poems in the third section, about the pandemic, highlighted by a six-part piece written in February 2020 (originally curated by Rattle).

The sky is nice, we grunted. The air clean.
We were surrounded by kindness that barely
seemed real. Our throats itched for coal

and tar. Whatever else we craved,
of insurrection or speaking truth
to bureaucracy, whatever small

bonuses we desired for ourselves
or ailments we nursed, of anger
or temperatures, we did it indoors

At the moment, I have a limited number of copies available through my website. If you purchase before April 10, please leave a name in the ORDER NOTES so I can write you a dedication.

E-books are available through Amazon. Hardcopies will be available on that platform as well, eventually.

I think of writing as a conversation, and being on this platform has made the conversation feel real for me in ways I couldn’t have predicted two years ago. It’s thanks to you that I’ve found fresh motivation to press forward and grow as a writer. Thank you for supporting this newsletter and for supporting poetry. If you have any feedback, I’d love to hear from you:

If you’re in New York this Sunday, I’ll be reading at the Manhattan Mandarin (153 E. 70th St.) as part of a Young China Watchers (YCW) event, 6 p.m. start (tickets here; hit me up if they’re sold out).

And then onto Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, April 2, at 6 p.m.: I’ll be at Dacha Loft (Shaw location, 1600 7th St. NW) for another YCW-sponsored reading.

Back to New York on Wednesday, April 3, 7:30 p.m., where I’ll be part of a lineup at Sundown Bar (68-38 Forest Av. / Ridgewood, Queens).

Finally, Cleveland: Friday, April 5, 3:30 p.m., at Abundance (1975 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights).

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You know the best part of publishing a collection? I can now start working on the next one. There is much more I want to tell you about. Stay tuned.