Extinction Theory

Poems

Häftad, Engelska, 2022

329 kr

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Extinction Theory is a collection of pseudoscience poems that try to provide rationales for some of life’s most salient mysteries. Where is God? What does it mean to belong? Who killed the dinosaurs? Kien Lam creates new worlds with new rules to better answer these perennial questions. His poetry is that of discovery, of looking at the world as if for the first time. Lam exposes the transitory and transcendent nature of things and how we find meaning.At the heart of this collection is also a cataloging of the smaller “extinctions” in life. Every passing moment is the death of something, and try as we might to recreate the feeling, it can never be the same. Maybe it’s a relationship. Maybe it’s a donut. It changes its shape as we juxtapose it against something new. Extinction Theory is as much about language as it is about the absence of language. Of English, of Vietnamese, and then of neither.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2022-10-15
Mått140 x 216 x 5 mm
Vikt121 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
SerieNational Poetry Series
Antal sidor88
FörlagUniversity of Georgia Press
ISBN9780820362731

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This book of theories, songs, mantras, and more—threaded through with flourishes of compassion for a father finding himself and maybe pathos for a mother who served as tether post for a speaker dizzied by colonizing language and the god it claimed to represent—it impels us to think hard about the word made flesh, or our existential fear made music, or the cultural alienation that doesn't transmute into anything and persists as a foreign object lodged in the tongue. 'Life is a series/ of extinctions'—excisions. Each time I read this collection, I think it pierced me for a different reason. In that way, all those edges, these lyrics are scalpels Kien Lam wields with an awareness that when one has something so sharp, they need not to press heavily to slice deep.