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Killing It
Poet Gaia Rajan's second short collection is a razor-sharp interrogation of queer Asian American identity, intergenerational trauma, and the detritus of American achievement. Here, lineage is at once redemptive and violent: "Sometimes / when people say Iím killing it I remember everything / exemplary I know or ever will traces back to a small girl / on the floor praying please, please, make them see me."
In this steely gut-punch of a collection, Rajan's speakers don't flinch, even when confronted with their own dissolution. They haunt ghost towns and cheer on bank robbers; they wake in the middle of the night with visceral dreams of a centuries-old genocide, trying to remember "how to coax a howl to eat;" they grasp for myths sturdy enough to hold, emerging empty-handed and furious. Killing It is vibrant, disquieting, a collection that demands to be read with reverence and abandon.
Poetry. LGBTQ+ Studies.
In this steely gut-punch of a collection, Rajan's speakers don't flinch, even when confronted with their own dissolution. They haunt ghost towns and cheer on bank robbers; they wake in the middle of the night with visceral dreams of a centuries-old genocide, trying to remember "how to coax a howl to eat;" they grasp for myths sturdy enough to hold, emerging empty-handed and furious. Killing It is vibrant, disquieting, a collection that demands to be read with reverence and abandon.
Poetry. LGBTQ+ Studies.
75 pages, Paperback
First published September 27, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
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April 23, 2025
To be visible is to be vulnerable. Holding in tension queer and racial identity, heritage, and the threats of a world that inflicts cruelty on those that can be marginalized comes Killing It, a stunner of a chapbook from Gaia Rajan examining the wounds of the past turned to scars from society repeatedly picking at the scans to draw fresh blood. A joy of my librarian work is to process the MeL inter-library loan holds (a program under threat to be dissolved due to Trump’s executive order to refuse paying libraries and museums what is owed for their services) and I’m lucky to have a wonderful local poet who requests a lot of fantastic poetry collections. Which I perhaps read before sending back, and this is yet another gem she discovered for me, so thank you (you know who you are). Rajan’s candid compositions are haunted by ghosts of the past and the self she was projected to be in others eyes, processing trauma and terror with unflinching poetic grace through both literary and metaphorical ghost towns. ‘If I wasn’t born with my fear, then I birthed it myself,’ she writes, yet, ultimately, this collection is about embracing one’s own identity and allowing oneself to ‘be the monster’ society has misjudged you for. A heartfelt yet heart wrenching collection, Killing It is truly killing It poem by glorious poem.
Inside Every Poem You Can Hear Muffled Screams
I like to eat my shadow. I like
to stick my hand out the window and choke
the first bird that flies by until it turns flimsy
in my fist, melts dead to the ground. I like birds.
I steal my ancestors' ghosts from clotheslines
and wave them as if they're sudden flags. I don't
remember why. I invent yet another universe
where I am hunted to great applause.
Someone else dies and it must be
a poem. Maybe with blood. Maybe
screams. Maybe a mother and child
at a dining table, and the child is wailing,
but you never see their hands. I like to stand
outside my body and set her on fire.
Watch her wrap her thumbs around her throat
break skin, but barely. I wonder
if the dead know we are writing about them.
I wonder if the missing girl wanted
to be a symbol. I worry that to be a poet
is to sit and wait for beautiful things
to die. To exploit distance. To steal
flight. To wring murder into myth, to retell it-
Rajan tackles the messiness of self-actualization head-on as each poem plunges the reader through the aches of past and present. The speakers of these poems lay awake haunted by decades-old genocides or the generational trauma of diaspora, they are flooded by memories of speech therapists and ghosts of former selves. History and heritage lurk in the wounds. ‘Leave the porch light on for my ancestors,’ Rajan writes in Inheritance, a definite standout of the collection, ‘no one lives just one,’ and we feel the weight of the past on every page. Yet ‘memory is about the body, not the past,’ she tells us and each agony is felt as an ache of the body. Especially painful memories such as in Ohio of the speaker’s mother ‘finding a poem you’d hidden in your backpack / about a girl at school and left the lights on / for four nights straight, looking at you / like you were monstrous or dead.’ Sometimes one must flee to be free.
‘Say ghost and you open yourself to death. A myth
And an exorcism are not different things.’
This is a remarkable collection that deals with a vast array of topics yet binds them close together as a rather systemic exploration of identity. There is plenty of attention to horrors of history yet also the everyday agonies. Where even success is a reminder of pain, such as she writes in the titular poem:
‘Sometimes
when people say I’m killing it I remember everything
exemplary I know or ever will traces back to a small girl
on the floor praying please, please, can you save me’
Rajan writes with a bold earnestness and honestly that is truly inspiring. ‘I have written my ache for you,” she writes in An Editor Says Can You Put More Foreign Words in Your Poems—a title that says it all, really—struggling between feeling ‘grateful to be here. I am grateful to be heard’ while also feeling she is confined and typecast in a way that Others her. A thing that makes her “interesting” but also a subject of criticism such as a white woman at a reading dismissing her saying ‘you only write about heritage.’ The dilemmas of capitalism where one’s identity is flattened into a marketing pitch for the sake of publisher sales, not unlike the critiques that were the heart of R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface.
’They found another corpse in the fields
And I dreamt of running, changing my name to Awe
And shearing off my hair with a butcher knife,
Asking for mercy on a highway. Cue the violins.
I auditioned for concertmaster, failed again.
Played more harmonies as my friends grew old,
And they were buried around me. When I finally die
I will be the most convenient ghost.’
—from Prodigy
Gaia Rajan’s Killing It is an exquisite collection and I cannot wait to read more from this poet. A brilliant and brutal look at the agony of accepting the self in an world full of hate-keeping and dismissal, Rajan boldly bears the scars and, even in the pain and frustrations, looks to brighter horizons. A knock out of a chapbook.
5/5
Bearings
You are in control of your life, you are in control of your life, you are in control of your life. Fine. I'm all heat, all panting
witness. Leaking, weeping sweat
through my scales. A thrum of minnows circles me for seventy days. I turn light-hungry, turn blue
and desperate for chocolate or blood, turn in my sleep toward the carcasses of sinking turtles, silver fishing wire
strung welted through their mouths. You are in control of your life, says the fish before his flank snaps up to the light,
dead already. I blink and forget him.
I hate the water for making me tell the truth about my life. Hate the people above for celebrating
my new ghosthood, for looking down and down into the water and seeing something like a god. Someday there'll be nothing left to spare.
Inside Every Poem You Can Hear Muffled Screams
I like to eat my shadow. I like
to stick my hand out the window and choke
the first bird that flies by until it turns flimsy
in my fist, melts dead to the ground. I like birds.
I steal my ancestors' ghosts from clotheslines
and wave them as if they're sudden flags. I don't
remember why. I invent yet another universe
where I am hunted to great applause.
Someone else dies and it must be
a poem. Maybe with blood. Maybe
screams. Maybe a mother and child
at a dining table, and the child is wailing,
but you never see their hands. I like to stand
outside my body and set her on fire.
Watch her wrap her thumbs around her throat
break skin, but barely. I wonder
if the dead know we are writing about them.
I wonder if the missing girl wanted
to be a symbol. I worry that to be a poet
is to sit and wait for beautiful things
to die. To exploit distance. To steal
flight. To wring murder into myth, to retell it-
Rajan tackles the messiness of self-actualization head-on as each poem plunges the reader through the aches of past and present. The speakers of these poems lay awake haunted by decades-old genocides or the generational trauma of diaspora, they are flooded by memories of speech therapists and ghosts of former selves. History and heritage lurk in the wounds. ‘Leave the porch light on for my ancestors,’ Rajan writes in Inheritance, a definite standout of the collection, ‘no one lives just one,’ and we feel the weight of the past on every page. Yet ‘memory is about the body, not the past,’ she tells us and each agony is felt as an ache of the body. Especially painful memories such as in Ohio of the speaker’s mother ‘finding a poem you’d hidden in your backpack / about a girl at school and left the lights on / for four nights straight, looking at you / like you were monstrous or dead.’ Sometimes one must flee to be free.
‘Say ghost and you open yourself to death. A myth
And an exorcism are not different things.’
This is a remarkable collection that deals with a vast array of topics yet binds them close together as a rather systemic exploration of identity. There is plenty of attention to horrors of history yet also the everyday agonies. Where even success is a reminder of pain, such as she writes in the titular poem:
‘Sometimes
when people say I’m killing it I remember everything
exemplary I know or ever will traces back to a small girl
on the floor praying please, please, can you save me’
Rajan writes with a bold earnestness and honestly that is truly inspiring. ‘I have written my ache for you,” she writes in An Editor Says Can You Put More Foreign Words in Your Poems—a title that says it all, really—struggling between feeling ‘grateful to be here. I am grateful to be heard’ while also feeling she is confined and typecast in a way that Others her. A thing that makes her “interesting” but also a subject of criticism such as a white woman at a reading dismissing her saying ‘you only write about heritage.’ The dilemmas of capitalism where one’s identity is flattened into a marketing pitch for the sake of publisher sales, not unlike the critiques that were the heart of R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface.
’They found another corpse in the fields
And I dreamt of running, changing my name to Awe
And shearing off my hair with a butcher knife,
Asking for mercy on a highway. Cue the violins.
I auditioned for concertmaster, failed again.
Played more harmonies as my friends grew old,
And they were buried around me. When I finally die
I will be the most convenient ghost.’
—from Prodigy
Gaia Rajan’s Killing It is an exquisite collection and I cannot wait to read more from this poet. A brilliant and brutal look at the agony of accepting the self in an world full of hate-keeping and dismissal, Rajan boldly bears the scars and, even in the pain and frustrations, looks to brighter horizons. A knock out of a chapbook.
5/5
Bearings
You are in control of your life, you are in control of your life, you are in control of your life. Fine. I'm all heat, all panting
witness. Leaking, weeping sweat
through my scales. A thrum of minnows circles me for seventy days. I turn light-hungry, turn blue
and desperate for chocolate or blood, turn in my sleep toward the carcasses of sinking turtles, silver fishing wire
strung welted through their mouths. You are in control of your life, says the fish before his flank snaps up to the light,
dead already. I blink and forget him.
I hate the water for making me tell the truth about my life. Hate the people above for celebrating
my new ghosthood, for looking down and down into the water and seeing something like a god. Someday there'll be nothing left to spare.
September 29, 2024
soooo good. gaia rajan is so young and he's already this phenomenal? we should all be very afraid.
January 4, 2023
pretty good shit. still trying to figure out if it was on purpose that she used the same simile in two poems in a row
October 12, 2022
These poems are haunted by ghosts of who the speaker was as well as the ghosts of who she "should" be that have been projected onto her. These poems are beautiful and elliptical and executed with a breathless syntax.
March 19, 2025
Been following Gaia for some time now and I truly see him as our next legend. Our generation is in good hands, poetically ❤️
“If I wasn’t born with my fear, then I birthed it myself.”
“If I wasn’t born with my fear, then I birthed it myself.”
September 10, 2022
Beautifully and powerfully written. “Performance Review” was my favorite of this collection. I look forward to reading more from this poet!
December 7, 2022
so so stunning, read in one sitting!! pulsing with life and fight. cannot wait for what Gaia does next.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews