"I leak blood memory and fade badly / is there some magic in knowing me?"

I kept thinking of julia kristeva's essay on the abject whilst reading this collection; an obvious connection, but one I notice always protrudes from my psyche every time I read Jenny Zhang. I've worshipped her work since I read that piece she wrote on Rookie about manic pixie dream girlhood as a non-white, non "normative" girl. This book pushes back. This is not even so much a collection as it is a monster, raucous, fanged, blood-lush, and needy. Language is a frontier, an opening, which Zang constantly renegotiates and splinters into precisely crafted pieces, leaving the reader to tear through the sharp edges with their own grit and gutsiness. She doesn't let us let her do the work for us. here is riotous, demanding luminescence; here is so much sharp tenderness and rage, here the marginalized body is not a site to visit or try on but rather a poetry in itself, here the incessant, specific fetishizations that whiteness produces and propagates are visible and breathtakingly, brutally articulated!! It's a monstrous book because it's alive. Because it's generous and vicious and exhausted and overstuffed with love, with the gross, with the desire to consume oneself one's flesh one's hope one's desire, to consume history and expunge it from our bellies. i just. damn. this is a hell of a book. jenny is!! unparalleled!!!!!

I love Jenny Zhang’s complete and utter ferocity with language, and the way she hurls her words onto the page and dares us to turn away. She uses shocking language not simply for the sake of shocking us, but because we need to be shocked, and shaken, and squeezed, and brought back to life.

Raw, filthy, angry, beautiful, and awesome poems. Really liked this collection; the images and curses and anger kept shocking me awake. One of the more tame examples comes from the aptly-named 'ted talk':

all the people with phones
don't think twice about buying onboard wifi on their
way to the latest Caribbean island still recovering from last year's hurricanes
would it be so wrong to wish
everyone with global entry be grounded until extinction is off the table
I don't think I can date another
digital nomad or a normie with a dog who doesn't know
what it's like
to be too poor to buy their way
out of disaster
why do the rich treat blame
like its' an obscenity
or a fossil
is it because they hate seeing blood
think they are noble for taking
quick little showers
and using silicone at the farmer's market. I have never sen
someone forgive themselves as elaborately as the wealthy
everyone who paid for their wellness
is infecting the rest of us

My friends are constantly raving about Jenny Zhang, so I thought I’d try her new collection out. Zhang attempts to make poetry more accessible and casual here, while also making it less accessible. It’s quite remarkable how the poems shift before your very eyes, one moment offering clarity and another throwing the veil over your eyes. There’s occasional nonsense, and it’s also occasionally brutal. It’s vulgar and violent, sometimes for a reason, and it tends to avoid the lyrical. Maybe poetry doesn’t need to be lyrical to be powerful. And this is a powerful collection, one that examines sexual assault, race, mothers, ice skating, gender, the body, sex, sickness, war, and class. I tend to enjoy poetry that’s more lyrical, so I didn’t really enjoy these poems, but maybe they’re not meant to be enjoyed. I also was thrown off by the structure and the way a train of thought could change abruptly, sometimes several times within a poem. All in all, these are quick, punchy poems that are quick enough to read through, but I won’t be picking this up again. Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

In an attempt to be subversive and push the boundaries of poetry, Zhang's first collection is interesting but feels overly drawn out. She uses baby language, perhaps a play on the whole "I'm baby" movement, to talk about sex, depression, family, etc. For me, it was almost offputting to see the use of "goo" every other word. Maybe it's just not a collection I gel with.

Adore tin house books and support any of their endeavors - but this collection of poetry wasn’t for me. I think I just didn’t get it.