Leong, Michael
Leong, Michael
Vicente Huidobro's Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven
- Year: 2013
- Publisher / Date: co•im•press, 2020
Co-translated with Ignacio Infante
Poetry. Latinx Studies. Inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde, Vicente Huidobro's SKY-QUAKE: TREMOR OF HEAVEN is a stunning prose poem driven by a relentless seismic energy that takes metaphor-making and image-building to unimaginable heights. Originally published in Madrid in 1931 under the title Temblor de cielo and in Paris in 1932 as Tremblement de ciel, this groundbreaking text stands as one of the most significant bilingual poems of twentieth-century letters. Part love poem, part surrealist narrative, and part philosophical treatise, SKY-QUAKE: TREMOR OF HEAVEN is intimately connected to Huidobro's better-known masterwork Altazor (1931) and stands as a major achievement in Latin American avant-garde poetry, again proving Huidobro's stature among the four giants of Chilean poetry, where he stands shoulder to shoulder with Nobel laureates Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, as well as his contemporary avant-gardist Pablo de Rokha. Released here for the first time in a trilingual edition with a translation that takes into account both the Spanish and French originals in its Englishing, SKY-QUAKE: TREMOR OF HEAVEN allows translators Ignacio Infante and Michael Leong to bring Huidobro's dynamic and wildly inventive poetic flights to new readers with verve and savvy.
Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry
- Year: 2013
- Publisher / Date: University of Iowa Press, 2020
Why have so many contemporary poets turned to source material, from newspapers to governmental records, as inspiration for their poetry? How can citational poems offer a means of social engagement? Contested Records analyzes how some of the most well-known twenty-first century North American poets work with fraught documents. Whether it’s the legal paperwork detailing the murder of 132 African captives, state transcriptions of the last words of death row inmates, or testimony from miners and rescue workers about a fatal mine disaster, author Michael Leong reveals that much of the power of contemporary poetry rests in its potential to select, adapt, evaluate, and extend public documentation.
Examining the use of documents in the works of Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Amiri Baraka, Claudia Rankine, M. NourbeSe Philip, and others, Leong reveals how official records can evoke a wide range of emotions—from hatred to veneration, from indifference to empathy, from desire to disgust. He looks at techniques such as collage, plagiarism, re-reporting, and textual outsourcing, and evaluates some of the most loved—and reviled—contemporary North American poems. Ultimately, Leong finds that if bureaucracy and documentation have the power to police and traumatize through the exercise of state power, then so, too, can document-based poetry function as an unofficial, counterhegemonic, and popular practice that authenticates marginalized experiences at the fringes of our cultural memory.
Words on Edge
- Year: 2013
- Publisher / Date: Black Square Editions, 2018
Poetry. Leong superimposes the following layers onto the reader's experience of his latest contemporary poems; politics, chaos, hilarity, language, meaning and camouflage. He uses language to show us all how language is used to manipulate everything we experience.
Who Unfolded My Origami Brain?
- Year: 2013
- Publisher / Date: Fence Digital, 2017
Who Unfolded My Origami Brain? is a collection of 99 fragments, aphorisms, and typographic poems. By turns gnomic, rhetorically playful, lyric, and apocalyptic, these distilled and minimalist texts were painstakingly typeset and printed by hand with a Trodat 5253 Self-Inking Custom Stamp, a mechanism that accommodates three and four millimeter rubber type. The goal of Leong’s ascetic practice of “stenography” (literally meaning “narrow writing”) was to impress a surface, to put it “under an impression” (in the way one is “put under” hypnosis). The poems were then transmediated and transformed to create a visually striking blend of digital and analog textures. The color-coded pages of the book feature special buttons that allow for multiple pathways of reading: Who Unfolded My Origami Brain? is a hypertextual, hypermaterial experience.
Cutting Time with a Knife
- Year: 2013
- Publisher / Date: Black Square Editions, 2012
Poetry. Asian American Studies. "Like a manual pilfered from an alternate history where science and art never diverged, Michael Leong's new book transforms the periodic table of elements into a kind of concrete poetry. Leong's glowing hieroglyphs show that the poetic Word emerges—as irony from iron—from the whirled atoms of the World itself. Indeed, Leong redefines the space-time of the page as a furnace of pure imagination, where the cadaver of modernist poetics is smelted with black humor, 'form[ing] crystals and other alloys at the boundarues of meaning. Here, we discover that 'Poetry is an ongoing reaction, a turning loose of the future.' For time doesn't exist without the possibility of revolution—and Leong has, in CUTTING TIME WITH A KNIFE, created a true 'chamber of possibilities.'"—Andrew Joron