Staff Pick
This hybrid collection is a lyrical exploration of women’s mythology and a reimagining of feminine spaces. It is a reweaving of ancient stories about Chinese goddesses, an exploration of the body as landscape, and a deep dive into liminal experience. It tells a big story: a romance between body and space, a map of the undefined spaces women’s bodies inhabit. Told in fragments, Moon uses a hybrid form that combines emotional and physical cartography, narrative storytelling, and lyric poetics. It reinvents these forms just like it re-invents folklore. The central thread of the book centers on the stories of the "Lady in the Moon" and various Chinese sea goddesses ("Women in the Sea”). These women surge and disappear throughout the book, reappearing and retelling their stories like the tides. What Cheng delivers us in Moon is a delicate, complexly layered letter. It is both translucent and dense, a sensual story full of texture. It asks us to get inside the envelope, hold it up to the light, peel it apart, and fold it back together again. It is an invitation to participate in the telling of her myths, our own folktales, and the common stories that we as humans are all a part of. Recommended By Ariel K., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award, chosen by Bhanu Kapil. Mixing fable and fact, extraordinary and ordinary, Jennifer S. Cheng's hybrid collection, Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems, draws on various Chinese mythologies about women, particularly that of Chang'E (the Lady in the Moon), uncovering the shadow stories of our myths - with the belief that there is always an underbelly. Moon explores bewilderment and shelter, destruction and construction, unthreading as it rethreads, shedding as it collects.
What are the secret aspects of a book, which cannot be spoken of and that unfold in ways that nobody can describe to us in advance? Can radical change be read as a "map of the body in motion"? If reading is a form of pilgrimage, then Cheng gives us its charnel ground events, animal conversions, guiding figures and elemental life. "I want to mark a new map for a body opening," Cheng writes, and then she does. (BHANU KAPIL)
What distinguishes this study of the Self in proximity to Other and to the World is the way Cheng refuses to tell stories and instead, insists on asking them. With curiosity and attention, Moon shines its light on inquiry as art, asking as making. In the tradition of Fanny Howe's poetics of bewilderment, Cheng gives us a poetics of possibility. (JENNIFER TSENG)
Synopsis
Poetry. California Interest. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award, chosen by Bhanu Kapil. Mixing fable and fact, extraordinary and ordinary, Jennifer S. Cheng's hybrid collection, MOON: LETTERS, MAPS, POEMS, draws on various Chinese mythologies about women, particularly that of Chang'E (the Lady in the Moon), uncovering the shadow stories of our myths--with the belief that there is always an underbelly. MOON explores bewilderment and shelter, destruction and construction, unthreading as it rethreads, shedding as it collects.
What are the secret aspects of a book, which cannot be spoken of and that unfold in ways that nobody can describe to us in advance? Can radical change be read as a 'map of the body in motion'? If reading is a form of pilgrimage, then Cheng gives us its charnel ground events, animal conversions, guiding figures and elemental life. 'I want to mark a new map for a body opening, ' Cheng writes, and then she does.--Bhanu Kapil
What distinguishes this study of the Self in proximity to Other and to the World is the way Cheng refuses to tell stories and instead, insists on asking them. With curiosity and attention, MOON shines its light on inquiry as art, asking as making. In the tradition of Fanny Howe's poetics of bewilderment, Cheng gives us a poetics of possibility.--Jennifer Tseng