Join Jennifer Shyue at Yu & Me Books (NYC) for the launch of her translation of A Blind Salmon by Julia Wong Kcomt. Shyue will be in conversation with Anni Liu. No registration required!
A Blind Salmon engages in Julia Wong Kcomt's characteristically unflinching plumbing of the human body and traces fanged emotions with sticky precision, exploring mothering, multilinguality, and madness.
Tusán writer Julia Wong Kcomt's sixth collection of poetry, A Blind Salmon is her first full-length collection available in English. Written while she was living in Buenos Aires, the collection crosses borders between Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chepén, Tijuana, and Vienna. It takes up sameness and difference, shot through with desert sand.
In these poems, Wong Kcomt renders homage to writers such as the Peruvian poet and visual artist Jorge Eduardo Eielson, who died in Milan as she was writing them. She fingers the filmy line between poetry and narrative prose to build a lyrical menagerie all her own.
Jennifer Shyue is a translator from Spanish. Her work has appeared most recently in the New York Times, Lit Hub, and Oversound and has received support from the Fulbright Program, the Cornell Institute for Comparative Modernities, the National Endowment for the Arts, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa. Her translations include Augusto Higa Oshiro’s novel The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu and Julia Wong Kcomt’s poetry collections Vice-royal-ties and A Blind Salmon.
Born in the year of the metal goat, Anni Liu is the author of Border Vista (Persea Books), which won the Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and was a New York Times Best Poetry Book of 2022. Her translations of the poet Du Ya have appeared in Two Lines, Asymptote, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She edits prose at Graywolf Press and lives in Philadelphia.