Poetry that knows what you are thinking.

e.s.p.

Literature & Fiction

Leong, Michael

Poetry

Silenced Press

Poetry. Asian American Studies. "Like a manual pilfered from an alternate history where science and art never diverged, Michael Leong's new book transforms the periodic table of elements into a kind of concrete poetry. Leong's glowing hieroglyphs show that the poetic Word emerges—as irony from iron—from the whirled atoms of the World itself. Indeed, Leong redefines the space-time of the page as a furnace of pure imagination, where the cadaver of modernist poetics is smelted with black humor, 'form[ing] crystals and other alloys at the boundarues of meaning. Here, we discover that 'Poetry is an ongoing reaction, a turning loose of the future.' For time doesn't exist without the possibility of revolution—and Leong has, in CUTTING TIME WITH A KNIFE, created a true 'chamber of possibilities.'"—Andrew Joron

Cutting Time with a Knife

Black Square Editions

Poetry. Leong superimposes the following layers onto the reader's experience of his latest contemporary poems; politics, chaos, hilarity, language, meaning and camouflage. He uses language to show us all how language is used to manipulate everything we experience.

Words On Edge

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Why have so many contemporary poets turned to source material, from newspapers to governmental records, as inspiration for their poetry? How can citational poems offer a means of social engagement? Contested Records analyzes how some of the most well-known twenty-first century North American poets work with fraught documents. Whether it's the legal paperwork detailing the murder of 132 African captives, state transcriptions of the last words of death row inmates, or testimony from miners and rescue workers about a fatal mine disaster, author Michael Leong reveals that much of the power of contemporary poetry rests in its potential to select, adapt, evaluate, and extend public documentation. Examining the use of documents in the works of Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Amiri Baraka, Claudia Rankine, M. NourbeSe Philip, and others, Leong reveals how official records can evoke a wide range of emotions--from hatred to veneration, from indifference to empathy, from desire to disgust. He looks at techniques such as collage, plagiarism, re-reporting, and textual outsourcing, and evaluates some of the most loved--and reviled--contemporary North American poems. Ultimately, Leong finds that if bureaucracy and documentation have the power to police and traumatize through the exercise of state power, then so, too, can document-based poetry function as an unofficial, counterhegemonic, and popular practice that authenticates marginalized experiences at the fringes of our cultural memory.

Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry (Contemp North American Poetry)

History & Criticism

University Of Iowa Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Leong, Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Leong, Michael

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Leong, Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

e.s.p.

Cutting Time with a Knife

Words On Edge

e.s.p.

Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry (Contemp North American Poetry)