Community Garden for Lonely Girls

Literature & Fiction

Hou, Christine Shan Shan

Poetry

Black Ocean

About the Author\nChristine Shan Shan Hou is a poet and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Previous publications include "I'm Sunlight" (The Song Cave, 2016), C O N C R E T E S O U N D (2011), a collaborative artists' book with artist Audra Wolowiec, and Accumulations (Publication Studio, 2010).\nPoetry. Christine Shan Shan Hou's newest collection of poems, COMMUNITY GARDEN FOR LONELY GIRLS depicts a journey that traverses imagined histories and various states of consciousness. In Hou's poems, "the now moves with such glacial intensity"—folkloric myth and cultural detail are weaved together in animated modulation. These poems assert that desire for the unknown is pertinent to understanding one's identity and survival: "I know I could die, but if / I could be anything // I would be an aquarium full of / colorful fish and deep // breathing, / You know // like nude and / without age." Like a feminist spiritual quest or the act of a messenger delivering consequential information to a participant community, Hou's poems shape shift while simultaneously evoking its changeability: "I open my legs and a saint comes out / like a tiny blessing." Here, the subtle, gross, and causal body get in alignment despite the complexities and controversies of living a life. "Enough dilly-dallying. The love is coming."

Gramma Poetry

Poetry. Christine Shan Shan Hou's THE JOY AND TERROR ARE BOTH IN THE SWALLOWING offers a new mythology for our "smooth and violent era." Together, these poems map a constellation of desire, addressing "the female pleasure gap," the exhilaration of submission, and all the mundanity and peculiarities of planetary life. Hou asserts that "you cannot rely on algorithms to take you to your destination," instead arduously pushing past habits, expectations, instincts, and other "nameless forces," toward the singular spark of enlightenment. In these fable-like poems, readers traverse landscapes both foreign and familiar. The result is a peregrination towards an afterlife "opaque & without backstory," where tame animals return to the wild and nature forgives us for our failures.

The Joy and Terror are Both in the Swallowing

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Books by Hou, Christine Shan Shan