recombinant

Can a poetry seek to examine the erasure and reconstruction of a community history? Ching-In Chen's RECOMBINANT is a work of material critique, philosophically jarring in its use of syntax, sound, the erasures held in the stillness of its white-space that again and again mimic a historical registry. Drafting and growing multiple discourses, this text urges the reader to investigate female and genderqueer lineages in the context of labor smuggling and trafficking. Its syntactical utterances create a music that is masterful in these poems' fractured words and experimental representation of page…