[06/11/24] Wong Kcomt, Julia / Shyue, Jennifer (tr.): A Blind Salmon

Deep Vellum, paperback

Publication Date: June 11, 2024

Translated by: Jennifer Shyue

Publisher Marketing: The first full-length English translation of Chinese Peruvian writer Julia Wong Kcomt, A Blind Salmon engages in her characteristic unflinching plumbing of the human body and traces fanged emotions with sticky precision, and also explores mothering, multilinguality, madness.

A Blind Salmon, Chinese Peruvian writer Julia Wong Kcomt's sixth collection of poetry, is her first full-length collection in English. Written while she was living in Buenos Aires, the collection crosses borders between Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chepén, Tijuana, and Vienna; ranges over mothering, multilinguality, madness; takes up sameness and differences; and is shot through with desert sand.

In these poems, Wong Kcomt engages in her characteristic unflinching plumbing of the human body and traces fanged emotions with sticky precision. She renders homage to the Peruvian poet Jorge Eduardo Eielson, who died in Milan as she was writing these poems. She fingers the filmy line between poetry and narrative prose. She builds a lyrical menagerie.