[05/11/27] Fang, Shangyang: Bastard of Elsewhere

Copper Canyon Press, paperback

Publication Date: May 11, 2027

Publisher Marketing: 

From Shangyang Fang's trademark lyric emerges his second collection, Bastard of Elsewhere, where the self becomes fluid--at once conductor and musician, audience and instrument.

"I can barely tell / imagination from reality." So opens Shangyang Fang's Bastard of Elsewhere, a collection where life is measured in apricots, a city's waist can be played like a violin, and dreams are as tangible a meeting place as memory. Exploring the extremes of violence and intimacy, acceptance and estrangement, the self becomes a buoyant object, while recurring "biographies" steady the self in moments of palpable vulnerability. "I am / made a foreigner / to find the passage home," admits the speaker, as they translate themself to earn acceptance--from the stranger on the park bench, from the ghost of a father. Shepherded by Fang's trademark lyric, we emerge from these poems utterly human, having felt the sting of an estranging world and unlocked a sense of belonging found only within.