This bilingual poetry collection https://everything.is by Samuel Caleb Wee and Nguyễn-Hoàng Quyên can be read as a poetics of spacelessness intercoursing with place. Conceptual explorations of the textual and linguistic dimensionality of the internet are punctuated with personal disclosures of a lyric mouth’s located happenings. The Vietnamese of Nguyễn-Hoàng Quyên adds complex translational layers to Samuel Caleb Wee’s transnational (Singaporean) voice, allowing for playfully serious and seriously playful interrogations of opacity and transparency that condition another way toward meaning inside modern existence.
PRAISE:
"Weird" is no longer pejorative to describe poetry anthologies. From the ripple perhaps since Lear's Complete Nonsense, poets move always from the settled serenity of traditions towards the limits of art. https://everything is is weird. Dive in and enjoy this labyrinth woven out of natural and synthesized cultural fibres that permeate a non-Euclidean word space.” — Lian-Hee Wee is Professor of Linguistics at the Hong Kong Baptist University
“https://everything.is schizophrenic & unsatisfied & overdue & uninterested in pretending otherwise. https://everything.is slammed halfway into a Vietnamese wall, making this reader wish he understood the language. https://everything.is leads to a dead link: long live poetry!” — Hao Guang Tse
"All voice. All eruption. All exploding, combusting heart. This book is a pupil’s wet dream. The impossible problem set up to frustrate, meddle, disrupt—if only the intelligent consciousness it takes to swill and quaff this ferocity of language. This enactment, this manufactured madness. Its hysterics delirious at first, then easing, relaxing into its own fashionable sense, its hypertextual everyway, everyplace, every thingliness. How this persona/poetry problematizes itself. It constructs its own narratological genius, ensnares itself in its own prison/misprision. Gloriously and variously, the reader recognizes the quieting of mind and heart. The becoming elegance and stature of lyric. The translation of what it means to be audaciously, dangerously alive. Then, the translation; then, the beauty of translation. I, Desmond, emerge from the paratext here. To say: God help us all, my dear and good friend Samuel. Your middle name is Caleb. And Jesus rocks, Jesus loves you." —Desmond Francis Xavier Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, author of Heart Fiat
ABOUT THE AUTHOR | Samuel Caleb Wee is a poet, writer, and scholar who splits his time between Singapore and the Pacific Northwest. His short fiction, poetry, and journalism has appeared in publications like Esquire, QLRS, and OF ZOOS, and he was previously the co-editor of this is how you walk on the moon (Ethos Books, 2016), an anthology of experimental short fiction. He will be starting a position as Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University in 2024. https://everything.is is his first book of poetry.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR | Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng is a writer and translator born in Việt Nam. Recent publications include Masked Force (Sàn Art), a pamphlet on war photographs by Võ An Khánh, and Chronicles of a Village (Penguin SEA), her translation of a novel by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Modern Poetry in Translation and other places. Currently studying at Stanford University, she has received support from the PEN/Heim Fund and the Institute for Comparative Modernities, among other honors.
ISBN:978-1-7320466-4-1 | PRICE: $25
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