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Crevasse
Crevasse, Nicholas Wong’s newest collection of poetry, 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. Crevasse collects poems that seek to uncover the seam connecting these mutually observed and observing bodies. Written in English, Wong’s second language after Cantonese, these meticulously wrought poems achieve a careful de-familiarization of language – its reliance on sound and sense and the painstaking, word-by-word accrual of meaning – to both enact and exemplify the irreducible persistence of the body through illness, dislocated desires, and colonization. Like Samuel Beckett and others before him, Wong has deliberately chosen to write in a non-native language – a decision that frees him to strip down, interrogate, and ultimately reorient the fragmented complexities of the multiple marked communities he inhabits: queer, Asian, Hong Kong native, poet, reader, lover. The results are a stunning array of poems, both lyric and experimental, which seek to lay bare the gap between perfect familiarity and inevitable distance – “The layered self/ on a plate,/ slain by silver-/ware.”
96 pages, Paperback
First published May 26, 2015
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About the author
Nicholas Wong
20 books10 followersNicholas Wong is the author of Besiege Me (Noemi Press, 2021), and Crevasse (Kaya Press, 2015), the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. He is also the recipient of the Australian Book Review’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize. His poem has been longlisted for the University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize in 2019. Wong has contributed writing to the radio composition project “One of the Two Stories, Or Both” at the Manchester International Festival 2017, and the catalogue of the exhibition “One Hand Clapping” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He teaches at the Education University of Hong Kong.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 7, 2019
best thing i read in 2018, no challenge.
June 22, 2022
"We say no man is an island to keep bodies
away from carapace, arthritis from the world atlas.
Even when someone is an island, no one has
turned a body into a ferry, hairs into life jackets.
No life jackets on the island: the back is the largest
plateau to hang a tattoo, to hold demurrals.
Let's assume the island is then colonized.
Peacocks open a spectrum of feathers to a noise
and mate in a foreign way. A satellite scans the island,
defines the circularity. Semi-
closed eyelids also show trust. The island's population
grows as the self splits. The first self shawls itself
because the second self self-actualizes too much. Locals call
it cukou, meaning exit, or close enough, fouled mouth."
// Archipelago
The second poetry collection in a row that just did not work for me. At least in the last case of Chen Chen, there were some favourites. Here, I could not be more indifferent. All these poems passed me by, there was no stimulation either on the intellectual or the emotional level. Sure, there were bits and pieces here and there that were enjoyable to read, phraseology, especially in the case of wordplay, and multiple meanings that were impressive, but there is nothing I would be gushing about many days later. "Trio With Hsia Yü" Is the notable exception and maybe "Light Deposit" at the very end in terms of poems that really made me pause. Vuong says, "Wong writes through the body as a way of finding a new hierarchy for the way bodies are seen and valued." I suggest you go see it for yourself. It won a Lambda Award after all.
(I received a finished copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)
away from carapace, arthritis from the world atlas.
Even when someone is an island, no one has
turned a body into a ferry, hairs into life jackets.
No life jackets on the island: the back is the largest
plateau to hang a tattoo, to hold demurrals.
Let's assume the island is then colonized.
Peacocks open a spectrum of feathers to a noise
and mate in a foreign way. A satellite scans the island,
defines the circularity. Semi-
closed eyelids also show trust. The island's population
grows as the self splits. The first self shawls itself
because the second self self-actualizes too much. Locals call
it cukou, meaning exit, or close enough, fouled mouth."
// Archipelago
The second poetry collection in a row that just did not work for me. At least in the last case of Chen Chen, there were some favourites. Here, I could not be more indifferent. All these poems passed me by, there was no stimulation either on the intellectual or the emotional level. Sure, there were bits and pieces here and there that were enjoyable to read, phraseology, especially in the case of wordplay, and multiple meanings that were impressive, but there is nothing I would be gushing about many days later. "Trio With Hsia Yü" Is the notable exception and maybe "Light Deposit" at the very end in terms of poems that really made me pause. Vuong says, "Wong writes through the body as a way of finding a new hierarchy for the way bodies are seen and valued." I suggest you go see it for yourself. It won a Lambda Award after all.
(I received a finished copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)
August 7, 2016
I've heard about the book because of the Lambda Literary Award that it won and bought the book purely to support a fellow LGBTQ Hong Konger, but was pleasantly surprised by how great the poems are. There are one or two poems explicitly set in Hong Kong; the rest were quite universal, though the word choices aren't as accessible as I thought they would be. All in all, I think the Lambda award is well deserved.
February 4, 2023
Una muy grata sorpresa. Algo leí de Wong y la verdad es que soy un poco fácil así que fui y me lo compré. Un acierto. Me gusta cómo revitaliza esta sinergia beat de mezclar lo “elevado” con lo mundano. Es como si el despertar espiritual del sujeto cohabitara con un depósito bancario o la preparación de un sushi. Me gusta eso, y hay poemas donde lo logra muy bien (shoutout para “How to Refund your Identity”). También me impacta el conflicto con el cuerpo y la corporalidad, cómo se disecciona y cómo esto puede suponer una disección del sujeto. Qué hermoso título.
April 8, 2022
An intriguing poetry collection, I am very inclined towards some of Wong's turn of phrases and would absolutely read more of his works
My favourite poems in this collection are:
Post colonial zoology
Self portrait of Eeyore, to pooh
Mr.
Five steps on expository writing: origin of hydrophilia
Light deposit
My favourite poems in this collection are:
Post colonial zoology
Self portrait of Eeyore, to pooh
Mr.
Five steps on expository writing: origin of hydrophilia
Light deposit
February 24, 2019
I've always wanted to read this poetry. It deserves the award. An Imaginative land of body. Some poems bring me back to HK.
June 18, 2015
It has been awhile since I have read a poetry collection, but reading Wong's Crevasse has reminded me how deep poetry can reach, wriggle, and slide into your subconscious, tripping fuses and setting off forgotten mines. Wong's poetry feels personal. There are stories hidden behind simple words, there are emotions hidden behind jargon, all stemming from the perspective of someone on the precipice, someone between worlds. The collection is beautifully arranged and demands to be read from cover to cover, but a few pieces that really stood out to me were: "If We Are a Metaphor of the Universe" ("If a fault can be undone like I am undone"), "Trio with Hsia Yu" (begins brilliantly with: "I entered the wrong room/and missed my reincarnation."), and "Aqua" (Loss now/a count noun,/concrete/like beans). An intriguing collection, accessible and thought-provoking all at once.
July 5, 2016
I rated it a 5-star not only because of the beautifully written poems but also because Nicholas Wong is the first Chinese writers winning this LGBT literary award. This tells us that we shouldn't narrow our perspective to the Western world in this minority topic.
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May 24, 2019Rereading needed
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews