Her poetry posits a zone of uneven exchange that exists along borders and in boomtowns, resort cities and future worlds.
Since her first book, Translating Mo’um (Hanging Loose Press, 2002), Hong has focused on developing different imaginary lingua franca (or bridge languages) that make communication possible between people who do not share a mother tongue.
It is this often volatile state of change and instability, slipperiness and unlikelihood, which Cathy Park Hong explores in her poetry. Parts of it are blossoming while other parts are dying. It is an inflicted and vulnerable body undergoing rapid change. No one is sure what will happen next, what transformation some part of it will inevitably undergo. The English language – particularly in America - is a field in which decay and replenishment are ongoing, unpredictable ruptures. Globalism and immigration (or migration) – in the form of pidgin, mispronunciation, graffiti, and encoded signs – have overrun the various geographical boundaries as well as upended the rules defining areas of fixed vocabulary, grammar and spelling. One of our most startlingly original poets, Hong draws together individual voices at odds with the world, voices that sing their wonder and terror.The argument between lyric poetry (that is poetry that arises from the poet’s voice (the “I”) or what Robert Grenier characterized as “SPEECH”) and text (the primacy of the written or printed word) is becoming an increasingly obsolete opposition. The third and last section, "The World Cloud," is set in the far future and tracks how individual consciousness breaks up when everything – books, our private memories – becomes immediately accessible data.
In the second sequence, "Shangdu, My Artful Boomtown!" a fictional industrialized boomtown draws its inspiration from present-day Shenzhen, China. The first sequence, called "Ballad of Our Jim," draws inspiration from the Old West and follows a band of outlaw fortune seekers who travel to a California mining town during the 1800s. Through three distinct yet interconnected sequences, Cathy Park Hong explores the collective consciousness of fictionalized boomtowns in order to explore the myth of prosperity. (Engine Empire is a trilogy of lyric and narrative poems t.)Įngine Empire is a trilogy of lyric and narrative poems that evoke an array of genres and voices, from Western ballads to sonnets about industrialized China to fragmented lyric poems set in the future.
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