Bound Together :: Daniel Owen & Jennifer Soong
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THE MANUSCRIPT
About Points of Amperture, Dan writes: "I thought that amperture is how you spell embouchure, but when i found out it's not, I started thinking of amperture as being some kind of hybrid between embouchure, amplitude, aperture, and armature. This mistake serves, I think, as a way of describing the poems in this book, which I also think of as points of departure. I think these poems are about gratitude and wonder at being part of processes that are baffling, disturbing, immense, mistaken (perhaps sometimes serendipitously)… maybe the poems are prayers for belief in the goodness of endurance in the light of such processes. maybe they are sometimes denunciations of such a belief. at any rate, the intention to make a considered, spontaneous expression that could possibly (hopefully) do something ultimately positive for someone else animated the writing. a cyclical expression of gratitude intention. along with a whole batch of other questions, speculations, concerns, and hopes."
THE AUTHOR
Daniel Owen is a writer, translator, and editor. Recent publications are Celingak-Celinguk (Tan Kinira, 2021), Up in the Empty Ferries (Third Floor Apartment Press, 2021), and Points of Amperture (dos-à-dos chapbook with Jennifer Soong's When I Ask My Friend, DoubleCross Press, 2021). His translations from Indonesian include Afrizal Malna’s Document Shredding Museum (Reading Sideways Press, 2019) and poems by Malna and Farhanah published in various journals and magazines. Recent writing and translations have appeared in Circumference, Asphalte, Columbia Journal, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. He edits and designs books and participates in many processes of the Ugly Duckling Presse editorial collective.
Owen Excerpt
Here the hundreds of years of images
intervene imperially in flip-flop poets and
courts in the art of struts and bolts, cock-of-the-walk
import-export. The patchwork silences, knowledges,
bodies board-washed and hung to sundry. Whose author
erects the images of the author who erects
the images of whose author stays home, goes to market, gets none.
Get along, whoever’d care to read. The disaster the living
wear and walk in traffics flesh and stone for an appendage’s
metastasizing glass and elementality, applying faulty
congress to the essence before the rape.
Clods of will, throat-stuck hardtack, send in
the mornings, send in the marines, you long-haired boys
ghosting the atom whose voice you set wheezing
at night behind the calendar, reciting unnervingly legible
mantras behind the wallclock that sound like some to music
like to truth unto others of heaven’s fear and terrestrial
faux — the no-chance fortune fucked is pregnant now with
luck, where once a cycle always a cycle …
THE MANUSCRIPT
The poems of When I Ask My Friend engage various degrees of density: density of line, density of phenomena, and density of breakage and fluctuation. Meditating on everything from bug bites to optimism, The White House, and onion and parmesan scones, these poems test the possibilities and impossibilities of poetic freedom, how one "moves in / uncertain ways."
THE AUTHOR
Jennifer Soong is the author of the full-length collections Near, At (Futurepoem '19) and Suede Mantis / Soft Rage (Black Sun Lit, forthcoming) and the chapbooks When I Ask Your Friend (Doublecross Press, '21) and Contempt (Spam Zine & Press, forthcoming). Her poems have appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Social Text, Earthbound Press, and Blazing Stadium, among other venues. She holds a BA from Harvard and a PhD from Princeton.
Soong Excerpt
Arguing grain, demented ice, thirst and entropy,
dressed-up rope, inaudible tattoo, Warhol and
marmots. “If a lion moves toward you,
make yourself look large, stand tall, open
yr jacket, yell and throw things.” An ill-prepped hiker
will have no other choice but to “eat light”
in the broad, well-shaded path. I put an onion
and parmesan scone in me; later, sweet bread
grape grape-tomato spinach avocado egg and coffee
cake corn brussels sprouts air fizz cold objects soft objects
canned objects malleable objects disintegrating objects
sprinkles sparkles shapes and words more words
white meat sculptural meat reddish brown meat covered in
sauce mashed potato-pieces I put the pieces of the world in me.
I’m hungry and I can’t help it. The world appears so edible.
I’m like an animal who wants to taste everything
everyone else gets to.
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