House A

by Jennifer S. Cheng

House A investigates the tones and textures of immigrant home-building by asking: How is the body inscribed with a cosmology of home, and vice versa? With evocative and intellectual precision, House A weaves personal, discursive, and lyrical textures to invoke the immersive-obscured experience of an immigrant home s entanglement while mapping a new poetics of American Home, steeped in longing and rooted by displacement."

Genres: Poetry, Asian American, Nonfiction

128 pages, Paperback

Published October 4, 2016

Reviews

[Tanya Donato · Rating 3 out of 5]

“weave together a contradiction of silences and angles, grainy and soft: a viewfinder we find necessary to approximate the (margins].”

[Johnny · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book of poetry examining the themes of growing up the child of immigrants as well as how the layout of our childhood homes effects who we become is something I didn't even know I wanted until I stumbled across this.

Being a first-generation American who recently left his childhood home, these themes have been on my mind a lot lately and this book didn't disappoint.

It's one I can definitely see myself coming back to.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

Required reading for the children of immigrants.

[Brooke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Letters to Mao was wonderful, but I didn't quite understand the other two sections of poetry. The way it was written just didn't make sense. This is not the poetry for me.

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best book of our poetry class! Meditative, gorgeous and delicately heartbreaking

[Jackie Craven · Rating 5 out of 5]

This winter (time of so much upheaval) I've decided to ground myself in poetry — to read and respond to as many books as time allows. I can't think of a better place to begin than House A (Omnidawn, 2016) by Jennifer S. Cheng. A series of dreamy epistolary prose poems opens the 122 page collection. Addressed "Dear Mao," the passages describe displacement and the ways "a landscape can cradle a person home." The short center section of Cheng's book is a lyrical alphabetized glossary that defines "longing as location." In the third and final section, "How to Build an American Home," black & white photographs, charts, and maps accompany evocative commentary on spiritual geography, the architecture of space, and the ways a house "steeps in spoonfuls of patterns, ghosts, leaves." In this "system of invisible dimensions," Cheng writes, "decades have no margins, oceans do not stop." Selected by Claudia Rankine, House A won the 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize from Omnidawn Publishing.

[Mills College Library]

811.6 C5188h 2016

[Greg Bem · Rating 5 out of 5]

An indispensable book covering the tracks of how migration matters, but also how we all live: through, before, and after the definitions of our housing.

[Nick Greer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of my thoughts on this book: thediagram.com/16_6/rev_cheng.html