Description: By day, Feng Sun Chen works at a nursing home in Minneapolis, by night she creates biting poetry like that found in her much-talked about first book, Butcher's Tree. In her second collection, The 8th House, Chen peels away the exterior of life's pink underbelly page by page, smelling the meaning in a mother's stew, carving light from holy grit, dissecting the surging waves of longing and love. These voices occupy the astrological 8th House, a house known for its healers and perversions, ruled by Pluto, where sex, death, and rebirth intersect and consume one another. Continuing to slice away at the distinctions between self and other, animal and human, male and female, the speaker of these poems "exposes by being exposed."
Brief description: A proud Black Ocean author, Feng Sun Chen lives in Minneapolis where she was recently hired at a nursing home. Her recent books are BUTHER'S TREE (Black Ocean, 2012) and THE 8TH HOUSE (Black Ocean, 2014). Her chapbooks are Ugly Fish (Radioactive Moat) and Blud (Spork), and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Similar Peaks, Claudius App, LIES and Stoked. She can be found blogging at fengsunchen.wordpress.com, and is currently working on some poems about spiritual death.
Review Quotes: "This reviewer found nearly every word in this book to be capital-r 'Right'--and that's an astounding achievement for any author, in any genre." --Huffington Post