Jane Wong

“In Over Pour, sometimes wearing her mother’s fierce, rueful shadow like a tailored dress, always sizing up the ineluctable phenomena of quotidian possibility against memory, heritage and history, Jane Wong makes her way.  Each of the book’s poems unfolds as a series of dense, abrupt, sharply metaphorical utterances, each utterance an action that builds further feeling and meaning.   Voices, worlds, temporalities and tenses intertwine, transformed through an incantatory, ironic, folkloric argot that fuses them into a way of seeing.  What they show us is tough, rueful, and stubbornly vital, a pungent broth of revelation.”

Looking at her more recent work, while the culinary metaphor still seems appropriate, the poet seems to be diving deeper and deeper into the reaches of argot, imagery, linguistic registers and modes of diction.  The voice in the poem flakes off into myriad rueful, angry, obstreperously funny and wincingly satirical epigrams.  The mordantly personal, the fantastically historical and the mundanely persistent world of Wong’s Chinese America collide with botanical phantasmagoria and with  the imbecilically insistent present of the white American cultural landscape.  The end result is unnerving, sometimes devastating and oddly hilarious.

Now we have Jane's memoir! Hold onto your seats!