Kim Gek Lin Short's Blog

Heartfelt thanks for Megan Milks for this thoughtful review of CHINA COWBOY.

From: American Book Review

Volume 34, Number 5, July/August 2013

p. 12 | 10.1353/abr.2013.0088

Brief excerpt of the content:

China Cowboy tells the story of La La, a twelve-year-old Chinese girl from Hong Kong who is kidnapped and made into a sex slave by an American soybean farmer named Ren (pronounced “run,” as in “run, La La! Run!”). But is she actually kidnapped, or is the kidnapping a ruse designed by La La herself to get her to the U.S., where she can become the next country superstar, her dream? Through the figure of La La, a tragic (child) victim/heroine not unlike the stars La La idolizes, Kim Gek Lin Short explores questions of agency and exploitation—emphasis on exploitation.

Short is an elegant, entrancing writer, and her second book-length collection is both devastating and uncomfortably enjoyable. China Cowboy is a loosely constructed, fluid narrative, told via prose poetry that adopts the double tone of a tragicomedy: La La taking a carnivalesque romp through a sorrowful Patsy Cline album. It moves freely between the grotesque and the surreal, and reads simultaneously like a concept album and a biopic. This multilevel formal hybridity reflects and informs its investigation of La La’s hybrid existence as a Chinese girl with American dreams, a hybridity that is also reflected in its design: the book’s cover and section title pages are fashioned after film posters that mix the iconography of classic American Westerns and ’70s-era Chinese martial arts films.

China Cowboy’s design speaks not only to the book’s hybridity but also to its relationship to cinema. La La and Ren experience their relationship through various cinematic roles. At one point, Ren recites scenes from “that movie by Zhang Yimou” to La La, likely referring to the 1987 historical melodrama Hong Gao Liang (Red Sorghum), which involves the romance between a young girl and an older suitor. This recitation takes place in a poem with a title, “Butcher Holler,” that invokes the childhood home of Loretta Lynn, who married 22-year-old “Doo” at the age of 15, a tumultuous relationship that is dramatized in the biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980). La La says: “In my sleep I am starring in Coal Miner’s / Daughter. I am as convincing as Sissy Spacek except I am Chinese / and just can’t help it. I can’t.”

If these roles provide La La with ways of understanding her situation and the performances expected of her, they also fuel her fantasies of following her idols’ paths from humble beginnings to fame and wealth. Her identifications with stars like Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline are frustrated by her ethnicity—“La La always wanted to be a cowgirl” but “COWGIRLS DON’T HAVE FLAT FACES,” her mother insists. La La doesn’t care: “When I get to America I can be anything I can be Patsy Cline I have her wrists.” Used and exploited by Ren, she makes it to America—though this is questionable, as it’s possible La La’s fantasies have taken over as a form of dissociation. Within this abusive relationship, she does, in a sense, become Patsy (or at least the movie version), and ventriloquizes Cline’s mournful songs of wretched love as a survival strategy.

“La La”: short for song, and short for Lolita. While China Cowboy is the story of La La, it is the story of all the other La Las, too, and the various frames that contain them. There are three La Las alluded to in the book, all of them the same/different. La La is not only the three La Las: she is also Patsy, Loretta, Jessica Lange as Patsy, Sissy Spacek as Loretta, Heidi (who has “more clothes than La / La but La La still has enough to be Heidi”), as well as Shirley Temple, yodeling at the empty sky. She is the child wife in Red Sorghum (1986/1987); she is Humbert Humbert’s fetishized Lolita; and she is “not La La” at all. La La is both alive and dead—she tells the reader (whom she addresses as “y’all,” serious about her country star stature), that in 1997, “I would’ve been 20.” Her body’s been found, but La La’s still singing…

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“Short is an elegant, entrancing writer, and her second book-length collection is both devastating and uncomfortably enjoyable. “

I've been busy, but I did make time to talk to poet Gregory Lawless about my book The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits over at his blog. From What Passes for Meat in Heaven: An Interview":

GL: . . .you've concentrated much of your efforts on exploring characters that have weathered considerable trauma. These figures are both sustained and potentially crippled by their fantasies that lead them away from their suffering. Delmore Schwartz wrote: "In the unpredictable and fearful future that awaits civilization, the poet must be prepared to be alienated and indestructible. He must dedicate himself to poetry, although no one else seems likely to read what he writers, and he must be indestructible as a poet until he is destroyed as a human being." Masculine gender bias aside, do you see any value in Schwartz's above proclamation and prescription for the poet? Must a poet be (at least temporarily) "alienated and indestructible" in order to dramatize suffering in her work? Or should the poet share in the suffering of her creative progeny in order to reveal it?

KGLS: Ah, civilization and its discontents. The future is scary. People suck. Poets rule. Yes, poets should prepare themselves for a good dose of marginalization, Schwartz's prescription has some truth. This sort of glorification of artistic alienation always put me in mind of The Residents' Theory of Obscurity, the idea that the artist creates work in isolation for the art itself without consideration for audience, or "market." In the case of The Residents the artist goes so far as to conceal her "real" identity, which doesn't matter, only the art does. Artists like Fever Ray and even Lady Gaga do this to a limited extent. So this is like what Schwartz is saying about the indestructibility of the poet and the destruction of the human being. Although I don't think Schwartz is prescribing concealment of identity, but rather that the poet and the art merge to transcend finite material existence. It is an exaltation of poetic identity, a superidentity. At its best, it has something to do with souls, or that part of ourselves that is eternal, the stuff we hope our art is made of.

Great works of art can come from alienation or not, to answer your penultimate question. As for the final question—"should the poet share in the suffering of her progeny in order to reveal it"—yes. This is not to suggest that a character or a character's circumstances in a book should be conflated with the author or the author's life, they shouldn't. But if there is suffering, or any measure of emotional depth in a work that exceeds the merely rhapsodic, that lives and has truth and guts, it is because the author has experienced that emotion.

Becca Klaver reviewed my book Run for Denver Quarterly. It's a thoughtful review that is full of heart and you can read it here. Thank you Becca!

From Darker Than a Country Song:

Thinking about the paradoxes of Run leads me finally to the question of genre. Short's writing is often called "hybrid," but my sense is that this is not precise enough, because the fictional narrative element is so strong. Thinking about these questions of terminology, Alice Notley writes in her preface to Reason and Other Women (Chax, 2010), regarding the writing in that book: "Is it prose or poetry? It is of course poetry, which is much more a matter of sound and compression than of white space and line breaks. I am, as I've often said, trying to steal story back from prose to poetry." Short's achievement in Run is to "steal" for prose both the compressed sounds of poetry and the tugs and pangs of story. Terms such as "prose poems," "short shorts," and "flash fiction" are in rotation right now, but perhaps we need a new term such as "poetic novella" for series of linked prose poems that work as discrete entities but add up to a larger story. ("Novel-in-verse" comes close, but ultimately doesn't work because "verse" implies lineation.) Or, perhaps we need a broader term that brackets a tradition, because it's easy to see Run as an heir to, say, Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, and as part of a larger contemporary cluster that might include Danielle Pafunda's My Zorba, Cathy Park Hong's Dance Dance Revolution, and Sabrina Orah Mark's Tsim Tsum. That these are all written by women, and all contain elements of fantasy, sci-fi, myth, or fable, seems worth noting, too. When I read writing like this, I think of Adrienne Rich, who said 40 years ago in "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision": "For writers, and at this moment for women writers in particular, there is the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored." The psyche Short explores in Run is indeed geographical, and the fantasia-maps she sketches open up new worlds even as they leave a trail back to the brutality women and girls endure, and sometimes survive, in the real world.

My chapbook Run was part of The Magic Child Repository: A Collection of Handmade Books and Book Objects," curated by Art Middleton of Providence at Craftland (235 Westminster Street, Providence). From Greg Cook's review Alan Metnick at Gallery Z and The Magic Child Repository in The Boston Phoenix:

"The word books are mostly by word people with an interest in design, but a greater interest in words. So the art is usually reserved for handsome screenprinted or letterpress covers like Rope-A-Dope Press' Run, a crisply designed chapbook of fiction by Kim Gek Lin Short featuring a cover decorated by a drawing of cowboy boots on crème paper with blue type."

(It's always a good time to give a gift of wuv.)

Poetry Shopping Holiday Guide 2011 (click to read at the No Tell Blog)

For the one who is in charge (in charge—really, really in charge): Adam Robison and Other Poems by Adam Robison (Narrow House, 2010)

For the academic in need of balls: Core Sample by Gordon Massman (Spork Press, 2010)

For the mother for the daughter: Killing Kanoko by Hiromi Ito (Action Books, 2010)

For Andy: Hot White Andy by Keston Sutherland (Barque Press, 2nd Edition, 2009)

For the unhappy minor with whom you've traded places: The Sorrows of Young Worthless by Brandon Holmquest (Truck Books, 2010)

For your Thelma or Louise: Les Guerilleres by Monique Wittig (Beacon, 1971)

For the masses: Pluto: Never Forget by Christian Peet (Interbirth, 2010)

For the versions you love of her/him, so close and so far: Pigafetta Is My Wife by Joe Hall (Black Ocean, 2010)

For the uxorious (let this be a lesson to you, or not): I Smile Back by Amy Koppelman (Two Dollar Radio, 2008)

For the hipster/biddy in real life: Man's Companions by Joanna Ruocco (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010)

For the indecisive (and decisive): What Do You Want? by Marina Temkina (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009)

For the one who is hard to know: The Last 4 Things by Kate Greenstreet (Ahsahta, 2009)

Poetry Shopping Holiday Guide 2010 (click to read at the No Tell Blog)

For the shithole where you met the person you wish you asked their name:

Where I Stay by Andrew Zornoza (Tarpaulin Sky Press 2009)

For the one whose meaning cannot be symbolized:

Humanimal by Bhanu Kapil (Kelsey Street Press 2009)

For the family, it had a leak, we all got drowned in:

Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler (Featherproof Books 2009)

For the wide-open the wind-chapped the nation it did not fit you:

Big American Trip Christian Peet (Shearsman 2009)

For the bewilderment, overhead, we heard them chant it:

Tsim Tsum by Sabrina Orah Mark (Saturnalia 2009)

For the barbed the stung the scream when it left you:

With Deer by Aase Berg (Black Ocean 2009)

For the scars you hid in feathers:

The Book of Frank by CA Conrad (Chax Press 2009)

For the guilt, it changed its name, we cannot forget it:

The Failure Six by Shane Jones (Fugue State Press 2009)

For the map, inside your skin, you return to it:

Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants by Elena Georgiou (GenPop 2009)

For the fingerprints, you wiped them off, they reappear:

PERSONATIONSKIN by Karl Parker (No Tell Books, 2009)

For the scorch in the sky when it shows you:

Stars of the Night Commute by Ana Božičević (Tarpaulin Sky Press 2009)

For the whitespace:

To After That (Toaf) by Renee Gladman (Atelos Books)

Poetry Shopping Holiday Guide 2009 (authored w/ Chris Collision) (click to read at the No Tell Blog)

For the classicist/lumberjack: Creation Myths, Mathias Svalina (New Michigan Press, 2007)

For the mystic/romantic/guy who can't afford the therapist he needs: The Real West Marginal Way, Richard Hugo (W.W. Norton & Company, 1992).

For the historian/entomologist who habitually befriends low things: archy and mehitabel, don marquis (Doubleday, 1927)

For the statistician/pragmatist/diviner: The Weather, Lisa Robertson (new star books, 2007)

For the existentialist/Home Depot enthusiast: One Way No Exit, G.C. Waldrep (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2008)

For the spoiled mind who needs a reason to quit/keep drinking: The Dream Songs, John Berryman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982).

For the vegetarian/activist who also dabbles in voodoo: Ready-to-Eat Individual, Frank Sherlock & Brett Evans (Lavender Ink, 2008)

For the ghost/essentialist who wants to come back as a film: The Marvelous Bones of Time: Excavations and Explanations, Brenda Coultas (Coffee House Press, 2007)

For the mopey excitable youth who forgets that to go for a walk is to fall in love: Leaves of Grass: The Original 1855 Edition (Thrift Edition), Walt Whitman (Dover Publications, 2007).

For the stuffed or haunted or reminisced or sublime: The Exotic Moods of Les Baxter, Paul McCormick (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2008)

For the person you don't know but who is magically familiar: The Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson (Vintage Books, 1998)

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The Bugging Watch's 2 glorious days of  literary love from Black Ocean authors Rauan Klassnik & Joe Hall (thank you Joe and Rauan!):   

"This book made me and my writing feel like Klingons.It's beautiful. Exciting. And it made me ashamed." –Rauan Klassnik

In the rowdy, field of book length proems(?) / genreless expulsions / whatever, it's a stand-out, a thing of its own."–Joe Hall

The Bugging Watch is on Elizabeth Hildreth's and Steven Karl's No Tell's Best Poetry of 2010 lists here and here. Thank you, Elizabeth and Steven!

The Bugging Watch is a September 2010 Fiction Bestseller at Small Press Distribution.

The Bugging Watch gets blurbed in 24 hours by Mickey Hess at The Rumpus. (Thanks Mickey Hess!)

Elizabeth Hildreth interviewed me over at Bookslut. She asked me lots of good questions, such as:

Liz: Something really notable about your work is how, to me at least, it can be defined so neatly as "prose poetry." I read so many prose poems and I'm struck thinking either a) this is a lyric poem with the line breaks removed, b) this is a one-paragraph short story, c) this is a one-paragraph essay. If someone asked me to define a prose poem, I'm not entirely sure what I'd say, but I would use one of yours as an example. Here's what I'm talking about from Run, from the poem "Nebulizer":

Please in my new life I will mend this rubber seal my soul, a swollen rubber place. In my new life I will — he pulls the nebulizer off my face, a sunk space it stretches. It is so much like hell. I promise. In my new life.

Why does the form appeal to you and do you feel like these poems could have been written in any other form?

Kim: I find it impossible to assign any static definition to prose poetry, too. But, maybe like you, I know a prose poem when I see it. For me, it is not a call best made by weighing a work's narrative versus lyric elements. And although prose poetry is often discussed in terms of its subversive origin, a primary point of this hybrid is its purposeful distinction from any origin. Sure, there are purists who regard the prose in prose poetry as pejorative, like a poem wearing a cheap prose wig and hollering, look at me! I am a poem without line breaks! I hate white space! But what it comes down to for me, most times, is very simply a feeling: an undeniable poetic underpinning in a work of prose. Like looking at a readymade and wondering, is it a toilet or is it art? I usually find answers to questions like these in my gut not my head.

And yes, absolutely the prose in Run or The Bugging Watch could have been written another way. Maybe someone else could give it a go? I do love a good remake.

Dan Magers thinks The Bugging Watch and Run are not terrible.

From Dan Magers' review of THE BUGGING WATCH & OTHER EXHIBITS and RUN in Sink Review:

Kim Gek Lin Short's work utilizes narrative devices and creates a wealth of emotional layering by keeping the story simple. Her debut full-length poetry collection The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits consists of two child-like teenage lovers, Harlan and Toland, overwhelmed by the responsibilities of their relationship, and her new chapbook Run is about a country music-loving girl named La La, who escapes crushing poverty and bizarrely antagonistic parents through fantasies of country superstardom, and who then becomes locked in a charged master/slave dynamic by a guilt-ridden pedophile named Ren. There is great complexity in both works, which comes from a layering of points of view as well as the ambiguity of reality slipping into fantasy. The Bugging Watchplays out very much as a fairytale, while Run is suffused in melodrama. There are many excellent aspects of each, but what is remarkable about both is the convincing depiction of escapism to combat the pressures of reality.

Read more here.

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Mickey Hess thinks The Bugging Watch is not terrible. Mickey Hess' 15th round of Let's Get Blurbing! over at The Rumpus includes The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits:

"In this deeply understandable and boundlessly groundbreaking book, Kim – a dynamic, tumultuous genius – wrestles with a heartwrenching tennis-court addition. Coolly unhappy and remarkably sexual, this human poet is driven by optimistic people to swimming pools. Makes our old literary heroes seem snobbish and devoid of a personal life."Also blurbed are Shya Scanlon's Forecast & Stan Mir's Song & Glass. Read more here.

Bill Allegrezza also thinks The Bugging Watch is not terrible. Bill Allegrezza's Daily Glance includes The Bugging Watch:

"The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits reads like a dark fairy tale, one in which things never totally become clear. The individual prose poems often are somewhat clear, but they hint at a larger story, one that I could not completely make out. Bits and pieces are easy to see. For example, the main characters are in some sort of relationship. Really, the characters seem like they are out of some dark fairy world. I kept waiting to flip the page and see an Edward Gorey illustration."

Read more here.

I wrote a guest blog for InDigest Mag last month about hybrids and the process of writing The Bugging Watch and Run:

What about a boy who is also a bug? Who loves a girl who is also a corpse? Or an adolescent wannabe-cowgirl in Hong Kong who's hellbent on becoming an American singing sensation? Or the older American kidnapper who's hellbent on fucking her? This is the way stories begin for me, with characters. What initiates the birth of these characters is a mystery—a poster of a blonde Chinese girl in a Hong Kong video rental shop, or the terrible but catchy sentimental song, "Beside You," on Iggy Pop's flop American Caesar. It is the creak in the stage you hear during every day's performance, something given-up that wants to be again.