Join us as we celebrate Wo Chan's debut collection of poems, TOGETHERNESS, with readings from Cathy Linh Che, Sahar Romani, Omotara James, and Wo Chan. Afterwards, expect a Cantopop afterparty with DJ YiuYiu and performances by Divina GranSparkle and Junior Mintt.
About TOGETHERNESS:
Togetherness sends out sparks from its electric surface, radiating energy and verve from within its deep and steady emotional core: stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant, culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads weave together monologue, soaring lyric descants, and document, taking the positions of apostrophe, biography, and soulful plaint to stage a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is drag—at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking.
WO CHAN who performs as The Illustrious Pearl is a poet and drag artist. They are a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of Togetherness (2022). Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Poets House, and Lambda Literary. Their poems appear in POETRY, WUSSY, Mass Review, No Tokens, The Margins, and elsewhere. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and the Architectural Digest Expo. Find them at @theillustriouspearl.
PRAISE for Togetherness:
Wo Chan’s debut hurtles past any praise I can heap on it. Acutely aware of the cruelty of the nation-state and of the exhilarating splendor of drag, Chan’s language—razor sharp, captivating—refuses to demure, to clarify. A wide range of formal approaches and a structure that’s sheer genius troubles assumptions, disrupts notions of “togetherness.” I will be teaching this book.
-Eduardo C. Corral
It’s no easy feat to tell the truth, nakedly (or at least in a rhinestoned nude illusion)… and Wo does it with so much style, humor, and emotion that it always breaks your heart (and heals it all over again.) Get ready to sob, laugh hysterically, nod knowingly, stop in your tracks and go back and reread it from the start! Give it up for the unparalleled gift that is Wo Chan!
-Sasha Velour
Every poem is a mouthful of meat, music and memory. These poems are vulnerable and resilient, fluid and focused. A versatile and verbal poetics—an inimitable Wo Channess anchors these narratives of personal, cultural, and sexual survival. It is possible to live (on poetry) in a country that tries to kill you. The evidence is in every Wo Chan poem.
-Terrance A. Hayes
Wo Chan’s brave exuberance, their mercurial surfaces and depths both, line for line seem to say, “What is a heart for if you can’t put sequins on it, or glue gun it to your sleeve, or wipe your nose?” Wo Chan’s poetry and performances have sustained me for years, a favorite source of pleasure, solace, disruption, accountability, community—for years I have wanted this book and here it is now, the poems have gathered for their sublime cabaret. Nothing I could say would prepare you, except maybe an invitation: pick up this bright masterpiece, it is your turn to experience this love.
-Alexander Chee
This is a poet unafraid to tackle the tacky and the tasty; the gutter and glitter—those grand parallels of a life made for or and on the margins. In linguistic loop de loops—some delightful, others terrifying—Wo Chan perceives an America we can now easily recognize from a poet who suffers the wounds, but wants them healed.
-Patricia Spears Jones