At the intersection of land/sea, sexuality/gender, and fairy tale/reality CHAN SAYS & OTHER SONGS is a poetic, fragmented memoir that interrogates what it means to inhabit a space. From the spaces of childhood, of memory, of the body, of the performance of genders, to the niche spaces of modern queer poetics, and the traumatized self. At times whimsical and by turns deeply scarred, this is an interior landscape humming with hurt, possibility, desire, and an impulse to confront discomfort while embracing beauty. Many of the poems in this collection have been meticulously erased, or excavated, in order to create something like an after-image of the poems which convey new meanings that often contradict or complicate the original. My intention is to interrogate myself in the same way an erasure poem might interrogate another text: by mining the text for images and meanings that exist within the text itself. The poems and erasures are meant to face each other on opposing pages, so that as the pages turn the erasures sort of lift off of the originals, and so that they might be read as if in translation. Much of this work felt less like erasing my own words and more like translating, excavating, or exhuming the meanings within, or possibly like witnessing an erosion-like phenomena, the result of which creates something like Sapphic fragments.

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