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Decapitated Poetry
Poems from a boisterously out and open queer voice from Taiwan.
Ko-hua Chen’s Decapitated Poetry was the first explicitly queer book of poems published in Taiwan and remains a foundational work in Taiwanese poetry. Decades after it first appeared in 1995, this collection retains the capacity to shock, appall, and jolt readers into recognizing homosexuality as its own specific category of being. Behind Chen’s depictions of the disjunctive realities of queer erotic life, a formidable and uncompromising poetic intelligence can be seen at play. Alongside the erotic, satirical offerings from Decapitated Poetry , this volume includes selections from Chen’s remarkable sci-fi sequences that offer further transcorporeal meditations on forbidden queer love. Excoriating, heretical, tender, and always alive to the transgressive potential of language, this exhilarating volume from Seagull’s Pride List is the perfect introduction to one of Taiwanese poetry’s most daring voices.
Ko-hua Chen’s Decapitated Poetry was the first explicitly queer book of poems published in Taiwan and remains a foundational work in Taiwanese poetry. Decades after it first appeared in 1995, this collection retains the capacity to shock, appall, and jolt readers into recognizing homosexuality as its own specific category of being. Behind Chen’s depictions of the disjunctive realities of queer erotic life, a formidable and uncompromising poetic intelligence can be seen at play. Alongside the erotic, satirical offerings from Decapitated Poetry , this volume includes selections from Chen’s remarkable sci-fi sequences that offer further transcorporeal meditations on forbidden queer love. Excoriating, heretical, tender, and always alive to the transgressive potential of language, this exhilarating volume from Seagull’s Pride List is the perfect introduction to one of Taiwanese poetry’s most daring voices.
164 pages, Paperback
Published April 25, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 26, 2025
some of the weirdest poetry I’ve ever read.
Can another publisher please bring more of Ko-Hua Chen’s work into the English language!!!!!! 😭
Can another publisher please bring more of Ko-Hua Chen’s work into the English language!!!!!! 😭
August 1, 2024
chen’s exploration of the filth of queer desire and the strangeness of the body is singular and sprawling, expanding beyond the human condition and into the inherent queerness of non-human connection. brutal, disarming and witty in its solemn portrayals of sex, sordidness, inner solitude and identity
December 26, 2023
"When dinner lands on the table, you ask:
What's this we're having, then?
A soup made from your heart and your liver, I reply.
It's hard to keep human flesh ripe,
though my main problem is that I'm a lousy cook and you know it.
Often my brains are too bland, my loin a bit fishy,
the eyeballs far too firm,
dirty fingernails floating on the surface.
Human flesh is said to be delicious.
You look in your hollowed-out chest,
caress your insatiable belly, complain.
No fingerbones to pick your teeth."
// Man Eats Man
Among the queer poetry collections on the Pride List of Seagull Books that I have read, this one is my favourite and easily the most explicitly erotic of all. With titles like "The Necessity of Anal Sex", "Ten Condom Commandments", "Map of a Wet Dream", and "Bareback, Cool?", not much is off-limits for Chen when it comes to writing and exploring the ontology of gay lives, its attendant dreams and desires. There's an effort to amplify the dailiness of queer existence, to prioritise the material body. Throughout it all, Chen is pushing the boundaries of the normal and the normative. As his translators Wen-chi Li and Colin Bramwell contend, "Chen certainly represents many facets of queerness explicitly, but this explicitness also has a demystifying effect." The English edition is a curated glimpse into Chen's decades-long career with queerness and homosexuality at the forefront with Taiwan's history, its sense of place and socio-cultural mores, set in the background, knocking over all stagnant notions of acceptability and perversity.
(I received a finished copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)
What's this we're having, then?
A soup made from your heart and your liver, I reply.
It's hard to keep human flesh ripe,
though my main problem is that I'm a lousy cook and you know it.
Often my brains are too bland, my loin a bit fishy,
the eyeballs far too firm,
dirty fingernails floating on the surface.
Human flesh is said to be delicious.
You look in your hollowed-out chest,
caress your insatiable belly, complain.
No fingerbones to pick your teeth."
// Man Eats Man
Among the queer poetry collections on the Pride List of Seagull Books that I have read, this one is my favourite and easily the most explicitly erotic of all. With titles like "The Necessity of Anal Sex", "Ten Condom Commandments", "Map of a Wet Dream", and "Bareback, Cool?", not much is off-limits for Chen when it comes to writing and exploring the ontology of gay lives, its attendant dreams and desires. There's an effort to amplify the dailiness of queer existence, to prioritise the material body. Throughout it all, Chen is pushing the boundaries of the normal and the normative. As his translators Wen-chi Li and Colin Bramwell contend, "Chen certainly represents many facets of queerness explicitly, but this explicitness also has a demystifying effect." The English edition is a curated glimpse into Chen's decades-long career with queerness and homosexuality at the forefront with Taiwan's history, its sense of place and socio-cultural mores, set in the background, knocking over all stagnant notions of acceptability and perversity.
(I received a finished copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)
July 3, 2026
dont read this in public lol
July 13, 2023
Revivifying. The boldness of subjects and imagery are complemented well by the sometimes cool and callous tone often masking Chen’s vulnerability. Definitely re-reading this one.
February 23, 2024
When it’s good it’s luminous and when it’s not it’s mostly just misogyny. Will have to find a way to source the original texts from my grandmother without arousing her suspicions…
March 13, 2025
a book of two works: the second (and earlier) a fantastical and fascinating exploration of love in an apocalypse, addressed to an amorphous being who elicits the narrator's desires and reasons of being. call me a sexless prude but the first (and title) work in contrast is tedious in its perverse exaltation of anal fucking, maybe even less of a revolution than having my butthole tickled by the bidet
March 1, 2024
Outside of what the paratext on the book says, I think this book addresses and explores queerness as an enfleshed way of being. It dives into the filth of need in queerness beautifully and starkly. The sci-fi sequence in the latter half of the book was just stunning.
January 17, 2025
More towards a 3.5 for me. I get the point is all the ways we queer people are in our bodies and how, as the title suggested, decapitated from engaging with emotions. But ultimately I was rarely moved by any stanza. I think I need a bit more emotional weight behind my viewing of queerness.
That all aside, I genuinely enjoyed the sci-fi sequences. This half, for me as a person horrible at understanding poetry, did more in that regard.
I had a good time but I struggled to find why I didn’t DNF a couple of times and constantly wondered if some of the umpf was just lost in translation.
That all aside, I genuinely enjoyed the sci-fi sequences. This half, for me as a person horrible at understanding poetry, did more in that regard.
I had a good time but I struggled to find why I didn’t DNF a couple of times and constantly wondered if some of the umpf was just lost in translation.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews