Washington Writers' Publishing House

Testimonials

• an ambitious new entry into a larger field of feminist Asian American speculative poetics… The Machine Autocorrects Code to I reflects on a feminized and racialized experience to critique discourses of alienness and (techno)Orientalism. The poems balance between formal experimentation and lyric presence… are deeply concerned with the interplay of language, and are both multilingual and imaginative… Always, these poems are concerned with possibility, with a chance to embrace the future and marvel at its presence, the hushed breath at realizing that the landscape of a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter is not all dead after all…Luu is writing neither confessionalism nor realism because, as the poems of The Machine Autocorrects Code to I declare, reality is a fantastical landscape as fragile and ripe for discovery as Faerie or any alien planet. And, Luu suggests, with a sense of that wonder, perhaps the real can be reshaped, reframed, and remade—not towards utopian flawlessness but towards genuine regeneration.

  Tristan Beiter

• IN THIS DYNAMIC ARC OF POEMS, Chanlee Luu details cultural folklore, the bizarre enterprise of being alive, and the familial and personal intimacies that tether the Vietnamese and English languages. Luu’s deceptively digestible syntax gives way to strange scenes in which Vietnamese moms secretly rave, Inertia becomes chaos, and we receive lessons in chemical engineering. Luu’s lyrical landscapes cover numerous far-flung cities. I found myself thinking of the eclectic poetics of Christine Shan Shan Hou, and also of Harryette Mullen—but don’t be mistaken: Chanlee Luu sounds like no one else other than herself.

  Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Root Fractures and Ghost Of

• AT ONCE ZANY AND CONTROLLED, inventive and attuned to poetic tradition, Chanlee Luu’s debut collection marries languages and disciplines (chemistry, literature, music, math) in ways that feel unexpected yet natural. With a stealth debonair, with golden shovels that could slip by unnoticed if they were not labeled, Luu shows equal adeptness at free and verse and an abiding sense of music and story. Opening into a fascinating mind, these poems enlighten, surprise, and delight.

  Adrienne Su, author of Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet: Essays and Interviews and Peach State