DOUBLE DOORS OPEN
AS I wait for the writer Cathy Park Hong to meet me at Poets House, the public poetry library in New York City, I decide to track down her books in the stacks. I climb a winding staircase to the bright reading room, which looks out past a playground and a row of honey locust trees to the Hudson River. A man reads a newspaper on a periwinkle couch while a dozen people tap on their laptops and a volunteer straightens books on a cart. I find the permanent collection at the end of the room, and a few rows in I spot Hong’s three poetry titles on a top shelf, wedged between Homer’s Odyssey and Garrett Hongo’s Coral Road (Knopf, 2011).
When Hong arrives and I tell her where I found her books, she laughs. “That’s my home,” she says, “between Homer and Hongo.” Hongo blurbed Hong’s first poetry collection, Translating Mo’um (Hanging Loose Press, 2002)—published when Hong was twenty-five—praising its “canny and sophisticated verbal music.” And Hong published her own take on a classically inspired epic poem with her second book, Dance Dance Revolution (Norton, 2007), selected by Adrienne Rich as winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize.
Regardless of her placement on the shelf, Hong is an original writer, distinctive for her formal restlessness, slangy and polyglot style, irreverent tone, sci-fi tendencies, and resistance to tidy narratives. As a poet she conjures worlds and personas and depicts how war and colonialism warp and circumscribe individual choice. Dance Dance Revolution follows the character of the Guide, a former South Korean revolutionary living in a futuristic desert resort town, and was written in an invented pidgin that drew on Korean, Spanish, and Latin, among other languages. Engine Empire (Norton, 2012), Hong’s third poetry book, confronts the idea of progress through a triptych of poems: a collection of ballads and other formal experiments set in a nineteenth-century American Old West, a sequence of mostly prose poems about a Chinese boomtown, and a series of more lyric poems about a future of hyper-surveillance. “The language is volatile, undergoing metamorphosis and extreme pressure,” wrote John Yau about the book in Hyperallergic. “The fact is—Hong doesn’t repeat herself and she sounds like no one else.”
But today we’re not here to talk about Hong’s poetry; we’re here to talk about her first essay collection, , her most personal book and perhaps her greatest formal departure yet, published by One World in February. In seven essays, Hong examines what it feels like to be Asian American through personal anecdote, cultural criticism, historical analysis, and reportage. With great acuity and observational
