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Togetherness
A debut poetry collection in which non-binary poet and drag performer Wo Chan recounts stories from their queer childhood and adolescence.
Togetherness sends out sparks from its electric surface, radiating energy and verve from within its deep and steady emotional core: stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant, culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads weave together monologue, soaring lyric descants, and document, taking the positions of apostrophe, biography, and soulful plaint to stage a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is drag―at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking.
Togetherness sends out sparks from its electric surface, radiating energy and verve from within its deep and steady emotional core: stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant, culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads weave together monologue, soaring lyric descants, and document, taking the positions of apostrophe, biography, and soulful plaint to stage a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is drag―at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking.
80 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2022
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345 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews
August 4, 2022
Who is giving this book one star? Did you even read it?? This is my favorite book of poems so far this year. Very lucky to have gotten an ARC from the publisher. It is difficult for a collection to be hilarious without forsaking artistry and style. Wo Chan nails it.
September 26, 2022
UGH the gorgeousness, queerness, ecstatic-ness of "Togetherness" -- I haven't been so excited by a book in a while and read this in one weekend at a queer wedding, and honestly Wo's book was the only thing I needed. It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me want to get up a dance, it made me feel queer and possible and alive, and I am grateful for this book.
September 14, 2022
Stunning, beautiful, sweet, one of a kind poems. Wo has been my favorite writer for years and I have longed for this book. More thoughts as I digest.. I opened the book today and read it cover to cover. Wo is an exquisite literary treasure
November 6, 2022
Ever since I saw Wo Chan perform and read their poetry in Chicago years ago, I was excited for a book of their poems. Togetherness dazzles with fluid contemplations on our relationship to our own human body and that of our kin. There is the quirkily illuminating and unabashedly visceral hilarity body of drag and queer connections, the knotted, complex body of a family and the restaurant industry that binds them and pains them together. Then there is the bueracratic brutality of governmental bodies that cast some members of Wo Chan’s family as upstanding producers of the American community, while Wo theirself is attuned to the messiness of queer versus heteronormative faultlines, and conditional fragmented allowances of country, family, and history.
September 30, 2022
These poems are stunning, original, sensual, rich, and joy-full. This book is a buffet and I want to keep going back for more until I’m stuffed.
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January 28, 2023When I took a mini poetry class with Wo, one of the things they invited us to do was play with language and form: to create our own compound words/kennings, to use punctuation other than commas and periods, to use the words "airship," "fungal," and "cutesy" in the same poem.
Reading Wo's collection, I felt all the playful kindness and discovery they encouraged in person. Like:
"a ho hum soufflé in the oven I collapsed" !!!
I always love the mix of playfulness with earnestness and fracture, so this was interesting to read and see how they put those elements together.
Favorites:
- what do i make of my face / except
- "The month you continued to ponder..."
- Years Flow By Like Water
- the smiley barista remembers my name
Reading Wo's collection, I felt all the playful kindness and discovery they encouraged in person. Like:
"a ho hum soufflé in the oven I collapsed" !!!
I always love the mix of playfulness with earnestness and fracture, so this was interesting to read and see how they put those elements together.
Favorites:
- what do i make of my face / except
- "The month you continued to ponder..."
- Years Flow By Like Water
- the smiley barista remembers my name
December 26, 2024
3.75ish - objectively good but just not quite my cuppa tea !
absolute pearls, though, are "the smiley barista remembers my name" and "years flow by like water."
absolute pearls, though, are "the smiley barista remembers my name" and "years flow by like water."
February 5, 2023
definitely a challenging read (in the best way!), wo chan is an incredibly inventive poet when it comes to how they approach form and language. delicious and profound.
July 25, 2025
this was brilliant gorgeous funny stunning sad honest artful observant etc etc. there's even a poem about poop and it's genius. I loved this. wow
November 30, 2023
“All things I did with love, with love I kept.”
“where can you harmlessly place your devotion?”
“togetherness can be brutal. yet we need it.”
“i think you are the bravest person i know in that i can’t predict the limits of what you can do.”
“the times we have failed our friends still haunt us.”
“i’m scared of my desire for closeness to the people that a genuine feeling can hurt.”
“to honor my mother, who showed me what sacrifice and love could look like through her unforgettable cooking and life.”
“I really thought we had all the time in the world.”
“Years Flow By Like Water”
“I love them. I know that is not a radical statement, but I love loving them.”
“it’s here that talking fails”
“all this I glimpsed and still no words”
“on the platform home she self-soothes publicly, singing whitney’s i always love you, and i will always love you, no compromise.”
“where can you harmlessly place your devotion?”
“togetherness can be brutal. yet we need it.”
“i think you are the bravest person i know in that i can’t predict the limits of what you can do.”
“the times we have failed our friends still haunt us.”
“i’m scared of my desire for closeness to the people that a genuine feeling can hurt.”
“to honor my mother, who showed me what sacrifice and love could look like through her unforgettable cooking and life.”
“I really thought we had all the time in the world.”
“Years Flow By Like Water”
“I love them. I know that is not a radical statement, but I love loving them.”
“it’s here that talking fails”
“all this I glimpsed and still no words”
“on the platform home she self-soothes publicly, singing whitney’s i always love you, and i will always love you, no compromise.”
August 21, 2023
TOGETHERNESS had me at the first poem with a single sentence: "joy was flapping its wings in the dustbath!" Later a poem ended on the word "smegma," and another one asked this about a shit too big to flush down the office toilet: "What in this world is so defiant, so honest and immune to eviction, that it dares you to destroy it with your own bare hands?" Or how about a poem that mentions both a "Lisa Frank, holographic" agenda and how the U.S. military "harvested Mexican bats" during WWII and "stuffed them with plastic incendiary bombs / like breathing shishito peppers" to drop on the flammable roofs of Osaka? An ecstatic collection. Go, Wo Chan, go!
May 21, 2023
May 21st, 2023: Togetherness by Wo Chan (they/them). The publisher, Nightboat Books, is one I started following after buying some of their stuff at the Brooklyn Book Festival; they publish a lot of non-mainstream stuff, and I was interested in this given it was a queer poetry title. Borrowed via Hoopla.
Poetry collection about the author's childhood, culminating in a fight against the state as their family is on the verge of being deported. (Their family ran the restaurant Fortune Gourmet in Fredericksburg, Virginia, from 1998 to 2018.)
This is another book where I just wasn't the right reader for it, between not having much grounding in poetry and not having any connection with the cultural reference points the author does. (Many poems are devoted to the author's love of the show Chopped, and at least one review on social media says if you love that you'll love this.) The imagery felt abstract to me and I see from glancing at Storygraph that I wasn't the only one who struggled to make sense of the formatting of the poems. I liked the prose sections and was especially enthralled by the times Chan reproduced things like Yelp reviews of the family restaurant and documents from the family's legal battle, but overall I just didn't really "get it." This has a ton of five-star reviews on Goodreads, though, so people who know a lot about poetry seem to think it's outstanding. This is just me!
Poetry collection about the author's childhood, culminating in a fight against the state as their family is on the verge of being deported. (Their family ran the restaurant Fortune Gourmet in Fredericksburg, Virginia, from 1998 to 2018.)
This is another book where I just wasn't the right reader for it, between not having much grounding in poetry and not having any connection with the cultural reference points the author does. (Many poems are devoted to the author's love of the show Chopped, and at least one review on social media says if you love that you'll love this.) The imagery felt abstract to me and I see from glancing at Storygraph that I wasn't the only one who struggled to make sense of the formatting of the poems. I liked the prose sections and was especially enthralled by the times Chan reproduced things like Yelp reviews of the family restaurant and documents from the family's legal battle, but overall I just didn't really "get it." This has a ton of five-star reviews on Goodreads, though, so people who know a lot about poetry seem to think it's outstanding. This is just me!
December 26, 2023
Wo Chan also performs as the drag artist Illustrious Pearl, and this collection has all the innovation, flamboyance, ecstatic lyricality, and just fun you would expect. But it also takes on the vulnerability of an immigrant families experience in response to the power structures they have to navigate to stay, as well as the challenges of having joyful, self-celebrating sexuality coming from a traditional family.
There are a series of poems that take the form of letters to an immigration authority about the speaker’s family’s restaurant, in which the bending of self in the face of power becomes palpable. There is also a series of ingenious poems starting with @nature (ha, the very idea!) that are so smart in how they poke at the way our ideas of nature inform some of our rigidity about gender. My favorite poems, though, are the ones where the frantic joyful music of the speaker outruns meaning. For example: “some noted lifetime. some fingers freely, a hemisphere. / some oil cut on tough broad hands, some torpor inching / down. some family trees. some live, unexpectedly live, / and some sudden blowout—chrysanthemums”. This was an innovative, mind-expanding, and beautilicious collection!
There are a series of poems that take the form of letters to an immigration authority about the speaker’s family’s restaurant, in which the bending of self in the face of power becomes palpable. There is also a series of ingenious poems starting with @nature (ha, the very idea!) that are so smart in how they poke at the way our ideas of nature inform some of our rigidity about gender. My favorite poems, though, are the ones where the frantic joyful music of the speaker outruns meaning. For example: “some noted lifetime. some fingers freely, a hemisphere. / some oil cut on tough broad hands, some torpor inching / down. some family trees. some live, unexpectedly live, / and some sudden blowout—chrysanthemums”. This was an innovative, mind-expanding, and beautilicious collection!
June 20, 2023
woah *snaps* dreamy. yet also stark and clear. colorful and vibrant and gorgeous.
stand-out lines:
“thinking about a feeling is like photocopying a feeling. that scanning light is safe” (from “performing miss america at bushwig 2017, then chilling”)
“gratitude is the central pillar of my life” (from “it’s pride month”)
“in each language i speak, worry, still cry undarned, windsockishly— / the old depression has not touched me the same way. uncertainty / dapples across the faces of my friends. they are clear / shadows cast across the bottom of the pond on the bright, slow day. / ‘everything will be fine. you’ll be okay, no matter what.’ / i could feel the future shake across you right before our faces met” (from “the habits of your life simply become your life”)
stand-out poems: “@nature, teach me things,” “@nature, you are loved,” “@nature who’s willing,” “@nature…,” “the smiley barista remembers my name,” “Audition”
stand-out lines:
“thinking about a feeling is like photocopying a feeling. that scanning light is safe” (from “performing miss america at bushwig 2017, then chilling”)
“gratitude is the central pillar of my life” (from “it’s pride month”)
“in each language i speak, worry, still cry undarned, windsockishly— / the old depression has not touched me the same way. uncertainty / dapples across the faces of my friends. they are clear / shadows cast across the bottom of the pond on the bright, slow day. / ‘everything will be fine. you’ll be okay, no matter what.’ / i could feel the future shake across you right before our faces met” (from “the habits of your life simply become your life”)
stand-out poems: “@nature, teach me things,” “@nature, you are loved,” “@nature who’s willing,” “@nature…,” “the smiley barista remembers my name,” “Audition”
September 21, 2022
I loved this book because it made me feel like I was participating in, witnessing, a magical, complicated, sad, beautiful, funny living thing…like a whole bunch of parts, each described with incredible creativity and facility, being witnessed in the same place, which is really reflective (for me) of experience—of the process of experience. I feel like Wo Chan (or the speaker, I guess) has made their complicated, magical, sad, funny, gorgeous life feel very true—Togetherness feels like an invitation into the being of an amazing observer, one who is watching themself live and creating what they see into such immediacy and such tangibility. Really grateful for the experience of reading it. Sorry to get flowery. It’s hard to describe.
March 3, 2023
This is a really beautifully assembled collection. The narrative of it flows and weaves it’s own interconnected web in a way that is beautiful to witness. There are moments in which I am lost, unable to relate Chan’s words to any tangible meaning. This is a common problem of poetry though, and in a work that is otherwise wonderfully honest and vulnerable and human, I can accept that not every line is for me. I don’t think poetry has to be.
April 3, 2023
Discovered this book at the AWP bookfair and I bought it on a whim, and I was so pleasantly surprised. There were so many visceral images throughout, mixed in with a beautiful and heartbreaking narrative of Chan's family, binge-watching Chopped, and discovering themselves. This was a beautiful read, and I will always think of my time absorbing this book while in Seattle, sitting at wine bars and in hotel lobbies.
June 28, 2023
I was unsure what to make of this collection at first -- several of these poems necessitated several deliberate re-reads to comprehend. However, once I got my footing, these poems shined with their quirkiness, unabashedness, and exuberance. I suspect I will be returning to re-read and marvel at the "@nature" poems many times, and "Years Flow By Like Water" may be one of my favorite poems of all time!
October 30, 2024
Kai picked this out for me from the Seattle Public Library and it had everything I like in a poetry collection: consistent changes to innovate on form, word choice that halted me mid-sentence nearly every sentence, obscure enough language and references that I had to google definitions, and heart at the center of the story that shone through till the last page. Brava Kai!
///
Thinking about a feeling is like photocopying a feeling. that scanning light is safe.
Living is such wet data.
///
Thinking about a feeling is like photocopying a feeling. that scanning light is safe.
Living is such wet data.
June 24, 2023
Please note that I rated this to record my personal enjoyment, not my full critical opinion. I'm not saying this is low quality. I fully believe there is an audience that will feel deeply seen and connected to these poems. I believe there is an audience that will feel deeply enlightened and educated by these poems. I am glad this collection exists. It just didn't work for me.
March 29, 2023
4 stars - there is something really beautiful about some of the food and visceral descriptions, but some of it feels a bit opaque and I wasn’t in the mood to sit with it. I should come back to this collection sometime, for sure.
August 29, 2024
Dynamic. 4 stars.. may be biased because I got the chance to meet them during a poetry course at Lehman where they read for our class. It was a small group, around 10 people, so we really got a chance to pick through some of these and hear them live. Fire.
July 5, 2025
crucial July 4th read
whiplash
witty
heartfelt
I grabbed this at Portland’s Powell Books, and no regrets. His collection of poems has so much voice, authenticity, and flair paired with sorrow—it’s magic.
whiplash
witty
heartfelt
I grabbed this at Portland’s Powell Books, and no regrets. His collection of poems has so much voice, authenticity, and flair paired with sorrow—it’s magic.
October 11, 2022
Amazing language, refreshing form—wild intimacy wrapped crown to peep-toe in exquisite restraint. All the stars.
November 3, 2022
"All things I did with love, with love I kept."
December 20, 2022
love loving ~
February 22, 2023
Absolutely loved this.
March 19, 2023
I love this book lots. Spellbinding diction. Lots and lots and lots of love.
April 24, 2023
Thank you for Togetherness. I just finished reading it. The poems are heroic, fearless, touching, funny, amazing, relevant. Among the best poetry I have read- ever! And I read a lot of poetry!
August 9, 2023
“some crowded back / teeth”
Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews