"...the utterance that is a wild, liminal space, where identity constructions are not fixed but instead a question is inserted, an uncertainty is posed..."

Jennifer S. Cheng’s work includes poetry, lyric essay, and image-text forms, exploring immigrant home-building, shadow poetics, and the interior wilderness. Her hybrid book Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems (2018) was selected by Bhanu Kapil for the Tarpaulin Sky Award and named a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 2018.” She is also the author of House A (2106), selected by Claudia Rankine for the Omnidawn Poetry Prize, and Invocation: An Essay (2010), an image-text chapbook published by New Michigan Press. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has received awards and fellowships from Brown University, the University of Iowa, San Francisco State University, the U.S. Fulbright program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, MacDowell, and the Academy of American Poets. Having grown up in Texas and Hong Kong, she lives in San Francisco.

Artist Reflection

My interior language—the one I use to speak myself into being—has always been composed of fragments, splinters, opacities, and absences. Sometimes the only way I can elucidate is by way of blurring. Sometimes an uncertain truth feels truer than a certain one. If the world—and myself in it—never seemed whole to me, why would language? In Jacket2 I once wrote an essay series on “Other Ways of Seeing: the poetics and politics of refraction.” It was a way for me to consider why I feel compelled by literary and artistic forms that somehow disrupt linear logic and de-center normalized sightlines, instead pursuing “marginal” perspectives and perceptions. To articulate my experiences using the structures and strictures of dominant systems of knowledge and meaning is an impossible and contradictory task; I have always felt more seen and heard when I was partly occluded, untranslated. I have only ever felt comfortable, as filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha would say, speaking nearby. That’s all I ever thought language was. My desire is for the utterance that gestures toward without pinpointing because complexity cannot be pinpointed; the utterance that is a wild, liminal space, where identity constructions are not fixed but instead a question is inserted, an uncertainty is posed; where there is possibility for multiplicity, permeability, a continuously shifting space—other ways of seeing, knowing, and being. Critical theorist Édouard Glissant describes trembling thinking, and I am also interested in trembling language. “The world trembles in every which way,” he says. And also: “We understand the world better if we tremble along with it.”