A Blind Salmon

(Paperback)

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The first full-length English translation of Chinese Peruvian writer Julia Wong Kcomt, A Blind Salmon engages in her characteristic unflinching plumbing of the human body and traces fanged emotions with sticky precision, and also explores mothering, multilinguality, madness. A Blind Salmon, Chinese Peruvian writer Julia Wong Kcomts sixth collection of poetry, is her first full-length collection in English. Written while she was living in Buenos Aires, the collection crosses borders between Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chepn, Tijuana, and Vienna; ranges over mothering, multilinguality, madness; takes up sameness and differences; and is shot through with desert sand.

In these poems, Wong Kcomt engages in her characteristic unflinching plumbing of the human body and traces fanged emotions with sticky precision. She renders homage to the Peruvian poet Jorge Eduardo Eielson, who died in Milan as she was writing these poems. She fingers the filmy line between poetry and narrative prose. She builds a lyrical menagerie.

Author Bio

Julia Wong Kcomt was born into a tusn (Chinese Peruvian) family in Chepn, Peru, in 1965. She traveled from an early age, and her perceptions of country borders, different cultures, and diversity in ethnicity and religion became a strong motivation to write. She is the author of many volumes of poetry, fiction, and hybrid prose. She currently lives between Lima and Lisbon. Jennifer Shyue is a translator from Spanish. Her work has appeared in 91st Meridian, Action Blog, AGNI, American Chordata, The Arkansas International, Astra Magazine, Bennington Review, Circumference, The Common, Guernica, Inventory, Latin American Literature Today, The Margins, McSweeneys Quarterly Concern, New England Review, The Offing, Oversound, A Perfect Vacuum, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Shenandoah, SP Blog, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Words Without Borders and has received support from Cornell Universitys Institute for Comparative Modernities, the Fulbright Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa. Her translations include Julia Wong Kcomts chapbook Vice-royal-ties (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021) and Augusto Higa Oshiros novel The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu (Archipelago Books, 2023).. She is an assistant editor at New Vessel Press and a member of Ugly Duckling Presses Seal collective. She can be found at shyue.co.