By Julia Wong Kcomt
Translated by Jennifer Shyue
A Blind Salmon engages in Julia Wong Kcomt's characteristically unflinching plumbing of the human body and traces fanged emotions with sticky precision, exploring mothering, multilinguality, and madness.
Publication Date: June 11, 2024
Paperback ISBN: 9781646053063
eBook ISBN: 9781646053216
Description
Tusán writer Julia Wong Kcomt’s sixth collection of poetry, A Blind Salmon is her first full-length collection available in English. Written while she was living in Buenos Aires, the collection crosses borders between Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chepén, Tijuana, and Vienna. It takes up sameness and difference, shot through with desert sand.
In these poems, Wong Kcomt renders homage to writers such as the Peruvian poet and visual artist Jorge Eduardo Eielson, who died in Milan as she was writing them. She fingers the filmy line between poetry and narrative prose to build a lyrical menagerie all her own.
Biographical Note
Born into a tusán (Chinese Peruvian) family in Chepén, Peru, Julia Wong Kcomt (1965-2024) was the author of eighteen volumes of poetry, seven books of fiction, and three collections of hybrid prose. In English, her work has been published in The Margins, McSweeney's, Poetry, and other outlets. She lived between Lima and Lisbon.
Jennifer Shyue is a translator from Spanish. Her translations include Julia Wong Kcomt’s chapbook Vice-royal-ties and Augusto Higa Oshiro’s novel The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu.
Reviews
Praise for Vice-royal-ties
"Julia Wong Kcomt's poems sweep you into the tender points of the diasporic soul—that ache of always being a little bit elsewhere, the yearning for homes and languages that might have been . . . Jennifer Shyue's translation undulates with a delicate, playful attunement." —Katrina Dodson, translator of Macunaíma
"Now I want to read everything Wong Kcomt has written (is writing) and everything Shyue is bringing, so ingeniously, into English." —Brandon Shimoda, author of Hydra Medusa
"[Wong Kcomt] slings imagery like a backhand slap. The result is often a whiplash between yearning and carnage." —Justin Sun, Action Books Blog