Poet Chia-Lun Chang Reads From Prescribee
An arch, precise collection of poems that casts world-historical hierarchies in an aspic mold and serves them back to us on a warped platter.
Reading Prescribee is not dissimilar to the experience of coming across a recipe in a vintage American cookbook: it transforms the familiar ingredients of contemporary life into an uncanny, discomfiting concoction. Wielding English as a foreign language and medium, Chang redefines the history of Taiwan and captures the alienation of immigrant experience with a startlingly original voice. Flouting tired expectations of race, gender, nationality, and citizen status, Prescribee is as provocative as it is perceptive, as playful as it is sobering.
Participants
Chia-Lun Chang is the author of Prescribee (2022), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks, An Alien Well-Tamed (Belladonna*, 2022) and One Day We Become Whites (No, Dear, 2016). She has received support from Jerome Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Tofte Lake Center, Poets House, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (Sarah Verdone Writing Award 2022, Governors Island Arts Center residency 2021; Process Space 2017) among others. Chia-Lun teaches contemporary Taiwanese poetry and fiction at the Brooklyn Public Library. Born and raised in New Taipei City, Taiwan, she lives in Brooklyn.
The former Queens Borough Poet Laureate (2010-2014), Paolo Javier was born in the Philippines and grew up in Las Piñas, Metro Manila; Katonah, New York; El-Ma’adi, Cairo; Burnaby and North Delta, Metro Vancouver, British Columbia. He’s produced three albums of sound poetry with Listening Center (David Mason), including the limited edition pamphlet/cassette Ur’lyeh/Aklopolis and the booklet/cassette Maybe the Sweet Honey Pours, and was a featured artist in Greater NY 2015 and Queens International 2018: Volumes. He is the author of O.B.B. (2021); Court of the Dragon (2015); The Feeling Is Actual (2011); 60 lv bo(e)mbs (2005); and the time at the end of this writing (2004).
Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level, a finalist for the National Book Award, and The Rupture Tense. She lives in New York City and teaches at Bard College.
Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” Her recent poems can be found in Poetry, Harper’s, Boston Review, Granta, The Drift, and the Brooklyn Rail. Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. She received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. Skillings currently teaches creative writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn.
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An arch, precise collection of poems that casts world-historical hierarchies in an aspic mold and serves them back to us on a warped platter.
Reading Prescribee is not dissimilar to the experience of coming across a recipe in a vintage American cookbook: it transforms the familiar ingredients of contemporary life into an uncanny, discomfiting concoction. Wielding English as a foreign language and medium, Chang redefines the history of Taiwan and captures the alienation of immigrant experience with a startlingly original voice. Flouting tired expectations of race, gender, nationality, and citizen status, Prescribee is as provocative as it is perceptive, as playful as it is sobering.
Participants
Chia-Lun Chang is the author of Prescribee (2022), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks, An Alien Well-Tamed (Belladonna*, 2022) and One Day We Become Whites (No, Dear, 2016). She has received support from Jerome Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Tofte Lake Center, Poets House, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (Sarah Verdone Writing Award 2022, Governors Island Arts Center residency 2021; Process Space 2017) among others. Chia-Lun teaches contemporary Taiwanese poetry and fiction at the Brooklyn Public Library. Born and raised in New Taipei City, Taiwan, she lives in Brooklyn.
The former Queens Borough Poet Laureate (2010-2014), Paolo Javier was born in the Philippines and grew up in Las Piñas, Metro Manila; Katonah, New York; El-Ma’adi, Cairo; Burnaby and North Delta, Metro Vancouver, British Columbia. He’s produced three albums of sound poetry with Listening Center (David Mason), including the limited edition pamphlet/cassette Ur’lyeh/Aklopolis and the booklet/cassette Maybe the Sweet Honey Pours, and was a featured artist in Greater NY 2015 and Queens International 2018: Volumes. He is the author of O.B.B. (2021); Court of the Dragon (2015); The Feeling Is Actual (2011); 60 lv bo(e)mbs (2005); and the time at the end of this writing (2004).
Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level, a finalist for the National Book Award, and The Rupture Tense. She lives in New York City and teaches at Bard College.
Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” Her recent poems can be found in Poetry, Harper’s, Boston Review, Granta, The Drift, and the Brooklyn Rail. Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. She received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. Skillings currently teaches creative writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn.