A Bestiary

by Lily Hoang

Overview

Winner of the 2015 Essay Collection Competition, Selected by Wayne Koestenbaum. Finalist for PEN USA’s Literary Awards in Creative Nonfiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780996316743
Publisher:	Cleveland State University Poetry Center
Publication date:	04/15/2016
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	156
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Lily Hoang is the author of five books of prose, including Changing, recipient of a PEN Open Book Award, and A Bestiary, winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s 2015 Essay Collection Competition. With Joshua Marie Wilkinson, she edited the anthology The Force of What's Possible: Writers on Accessibility and the Avant-Garde. In Summer 2017, she was Mellon Scholar in Residence at Rhodes University in South Africa. She is Editor of Jaded Ibis Press and Executive Editor of HTML Giant.

Table of Contents

Introduction 9

On the Rat Race 11

On the Way to the Temple of Ten Thousand Skulls 25

On Catastrophe 27

On Measurement 41

On my Birthday, Dragons, and Intestines 57

On Oriental Beauties 75

On the Genesis Of Opportunity 87

On Violence 89

On the Geography of Friendship 91

On Markets 115

On Compulsion 125

On Scale 131

Post-Script 151

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/16/2016
In this genre-transcending work, selected by Wayne Koestenbaum as the winner of the 2015 Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Essay Collection, Hoang (Unfinished) relentlessly teases apart mythology, familial memory, and investigative essay into searing fragments, then weaves them into a dazzling swarm. Hoang models her postcolonial bestiary on the Chinese zodiac—“A pack of dogs. A swarm of insects. A mischief of rats./ You desire the human equivalent”—and uses it to represent such concepts as fidelity, beauty, and “the disgust of desire.” In doing so, she confronts such topics as feminine subjection, familial suffering due to assimilation (“‘Vietnamese women suffer better than all other people,’ my mother used to tell me”), and a sister’s addiction and death with a precision that is by turns vulnerable and justly incensed. Hoang subverts the moralizing tendencies of folklore to form a new hybrid mythology that, like all belief systems, reassures the believer—and the reader—that human vulnerability is undergirded by a sense of mutual care. “In order to join the collective, you must un-become, lose your face and skin, eject your identity,” she writes. “This is called belonging.” In Hoang’s mutinous cosmos, time warps and dilates to link ruptures between games and reality, the living and the dead, pain internalized and sickness expressed. This collection is both ravishing and ravished. (May)

Publishers Weekly