Description: Crevasse, Hong Kong-based writer Nicholas Wong's newest collection of poetry, which won the 2016 Lamda Literary Award, starts with an epigraph from Maurice Merleau-Ponty that notes the impossibility of observing one's own physical body and, therefore, the necessity of a "second," "unobservable" body from which to view one's own. The poems in Crevasse seek to uncover the thread connecting these mutually observed and observing bodies. Like Samuel Beckett and others before him, Wong has deliberately chosen to write in a non-native language--English, his second language after Cantonese. Freed from the assumptions and conventions of his mother tongue, Wong strips down, interrogates and ultimately reorients the fragmented complexities of the multiple communities he inhabits--queer, Asian, poet, reader, lover--in a collection of poems that exposes the gap between familiarity and the inevitable distance of the body.
Review Quotes: Crevasse is a gathering of poems that startle in the insistent way they play with memory, history, form, and the expectations we as readers bring to poems. These lines are invested in sentiment as well as intellect. Readers are invited to both feel and think in ways that create a dis-ease, in ways that push against expectations, in ways that challenge comfort. Wong writes in a seemingly causal, confessional, even glib voice about experiences and memories that discomfit us. The assistant poetry editor for Drunken Boat, Wong writes of bodies and antibodies, of Hong Kong and the Queen of England, of sexual awakenings, of race, of desire, of what we might see and know through the body, of politics as well as the erotic, of mourning and loss.--Maggie Trapp "Los Angeles Review of Books"