Monsoons, by Jaye Chen

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

In Monsoons, history becomes a girl. Two sisters fall in love during a war at sea: their incessant arguing rewrites the very history of lyric poetry into one tongue-tied love song. Here we do things our way: we macerate Milton’s form and let Eliot’s meter bleed out, we lace the epic verse of Gilgamesh and H.D with indie rock songs like Car Seat Headrest and Caroline Polachek.

Monsoons is excerpted from Homily, a longform epic poem that recalls Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette, and the book-length projects of Tommy Pico. Like the fleeting radio you’d overhear from a fast car, the pulsing fragments of Monsoons rewind and erase the history of war and girlhood. Together, the sisters make a world out of shrapnel and sea-things, traversing genres and styles, theory and traditions, poetry and prose, coming out of history and coming home.

Laugh at the sisters. Coddle their delusions. Let Monsoons be a prophecy. Do a line from it. Read it to your girlfriend. Take it to bed. Let it stay the night.

Jaye Chen was born and raised in Suzhou, China. They won the Academy of American Poets's Sean T. Lannan Poetry Prize for their manuscript in progress, Homily. Their writing has appeared or is forthcoming in poets.org, DIAGRAM, no, dear, and Screen Slate. They live in Brooklyn.