Overview

WINNER of the 2023 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature Finalist for the Firecracker Award for Poetry! A debut poetry collection in which non-binary poet and drag performer Wo Chan recounts stories from their queer childhood and adolescence. Togetherness sends out sparks from its electric surface, radiating energy and verve from within its deep and steady emotional core: stories of the poet's immigrant childhood spent in their family's Chinese restaurant, culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads weave together monologue, soaring lyric descants, and document, taking the positions of apostrophe, biography, and soulful plaint to stage a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is drag-at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking.

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9781643621449

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Reviews

This powerful book sends out sparks from its electric surface, creating such energy and verve from its deep and steady emotional core. Various tones and textures weave through-monologue, lyric, document, poetic prose-and various approaches as well: apostrophe, biography, soulful plaint. Wo Chan's book is a vibrant and daring performance of the most sincere kind. -2021 Nightboat Poetry Prize citation

This refreshing debut gathers its power by exploring the overlaps between gender, sex, language, and nationality. [...] Daring and original, Chan's poetry collapses categories to create inspired art. -Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) Wo Chan's remarkable debut collection puts in tension memories of the diaspora as the poems move between childhood, the family restaurant, and a racist immigration system that demands exceptionality and authenticity. -Orchid Tierney, Jacket2 Togetherness is a poetry collection I recommend to all who love poetry or memoir-or both. Its narrative thread follows the search for love and acceptance, both from outside and from within, and it offers a refreshing and deeply intimate experience from those not often given a voice. -Bella Dalton, International Examiner A glamor clown for love and art, diaspora and desire, Wo Chan's brave exuberance, their mercurial surfaces and depths both, line for line seem to say, 'What is a heart for if you can't put sequins on it, or glue gun it to your sleeve, or wipe your nose?' Wo Chan's poetry and performances have sustained me for years, a favorite source of pleasure, solace, disruption, accountability, community-for years I have wanted this book and here it is now, the poems have gathered for their sublime cabaret. Nothing I could say would prepare you, except maybe an invitation: pick up this bright masterpiece, it is your turn to experience this love. -Alexander Chee Every poem is a mouthful of meat, music and memory. These poems are vulnerable and resilient, fluid and focused. A versatile and verbal poetics-an inimitable Wo Channess anchors these narratives of personal, cultural, and sexual survival. It is possible to live (on poetry) in a country that tries to kill you. The evidence is in every Wo Chan poem. -Terrance A. Hayes It's no easy feat to tell the truth, nakedly (or at least in a rhinestoned nude illusion)...and Wo does it with so much style, humor, and emotion that it always breaks your heart (and heals it all over again.) Get ready to sob, laugh hysterically, nod knowingly, stop in your tracks and go back and reread it from the start! Give it up for the unparalleled gift that is Wo Chan! -Sasha Velour Wo Chan's debut hurtles past any praise I can heap on it. Acutely aware of the cruelty of the nation-state and of the exhilarating splendor of drag, Chan's language-razor sharp, captivating-refuses to demure, to clarify. A wide range of formal approaches and a structure that's sheer genius troubles assumptions, disrupts notions of 'togetherness.' I will be teaching this book. -Eduardo C. Corral This is a poet unafraid to tackle the tacky and the tasty; the gutter and glitter-those grand parallels of a life made for or and on the margins. In linguistic loop de loops-some delightful, others terrifying-Wo Chan perceives an America we can now easily recognize from a poet who suffers the wounds, but wants them healed. -Patricia Spears Jones

This refreshing debut gathers its power by exploring the overlaps between gender, sex, language, and nationality. [...] Daring and original, Chan's poetry collapses categories to create inspired art. -Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) Wo Chan's remarkable debut collection puts in tension memories of the diaspora as the poems move between childhood, the family restaurant, and a racist immigration system that demands exceptionality and authenticity. -Orchid Tierney, Jacket2 Togetherness is a poetry collection I recommend to all who love poetry or memoir-or both. Its narrative thread follows the search for love and acceptance, both from outside and from within, and it offers a refreshing and deeply intimate experience from those not often given a voice. -Bella Dalton, International Examiner At the red-hot, glittering core of Wo Chan's explosive debut Togetherness is the intersection of the foul and the forlorn. [...] Togetherness is not a study of restraint, but a joyous, unruly recreation of life's big and small (melo)dramas. -Madeleine Poole, storySouth Togetherness is a restless collection, brimming with forms new and old, some prose-y and others firmly poetic, and all eclectic. Most of all, it's a searching debut by a poetic voice that is as many parts scatological as it is experimental; as saucy as it is ebullient and sincere, as elided as it is overflowing. -Sarah Sukardi, Soapberry Review There's much to talk about in Wo Chan's work, much to love, and much to look forward to in future poems that are yet to be written by this beautiful poet. Togetherness is word art, a gift given to us by a very generous poet. -Judy Ireland, South Florida Poetry Journal This is a vibrant, critical and loving collection, one that startles through both the strength and vulnerabilities displayed throughout Chan's glorious, tender and occasionally wild performance. -rob mclennan A glamor clown for love and art, diaspora and desire, Wo Chan's brave exuberance, their mercurial surfaces and depths both, line for line seem to say, 'What is a heart for if you can't put sequins on it, or glue gun it to your sleeve, or wipe your nose?' Wo Chan's poetry and performances have sustained me for years, a favorite source of pleasure, solace, disruption, accountability, community-for years I have wanted this book and here it is now, the poems have gathered for their sublime cabaret. Nothing I could say would prepare you, except maybe an invitation: pick up this bright masterpiece, it is your turn to experience this love. -Alexander Chee Every poem is a mouthful of meat, music and memory. These poems are vulnerable and resilient, fluid and focused. A versatile and verbal poetics-an inimitable Wo Channess anchors these narratives of personal, cultural, and sexual survival. It is possible to live (on poetry) in a country that tries to kill you. The evidence is in every Wo Chan poem. -Terrance A. Hayes It's no easy feat to tell the truth, nakedly (or at least in a rhinestoned nude illusion)...and Wo does it with so much style, humor, and emotion that it always breaks your heart (and heals it all over again.) Get ready to sob, laugh hysterically, nod knowingly, stop in your tracks and go back and reread it from the start! Give it up for the unparalleled gift that is Wo Chan! -Sasha Velour Wo Chan's debut hurtles past any praise I can heap on it. Acutely aware of the cruelty of the nation-state and of the exhilarating splendor of drag, Chan's language-razor sharp, captivating-refuses to demure, to clarify. A wide range of formal approaches and a structure that's sheer genius troubles assumptions, disrupts notions of 'togetherness.' I will be teaching this book. -Eduardo C. Corral This is a poet unafraid to tackle the tacky and the tasty; the gutter and glitter-those grand parallels of a life made for or and on the margins. In linguistic loop de loops-some delightful, others terrifying-Wo Chan perceives an America we can now easily recognize from a poet who suffers the wounds, but wants them healed. -Patricia Spears Jones

Author Information

Wo Chan who performs as The Illustrious Pearl is a poet and drag artist. They are a winner of the 2020 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of TOGETHERNESS (2022). Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Poets House, and Lambda Literary. Their poems appear in POETRY, WUSSY, Mass Review, No Tokens, and The Margins. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N' Play, Wo has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts and elsewhere. They are a regular at Sasha Velour's Nightgowns and have starred in short films and music videos, featured in documentaries, and performed at cabarets and clubs across the US. They are currently the Communications Manager of Lambda Literary and the Editor of the Lambda Literary Review. They live in Brooklyn, NY. Find them at @theillustriouspearl.

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