Empire Builder, by Jinyi Qu

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Anchored by the image of an Amtrak train cutting through howling plains, Empire Builder sifts through vignettes of personal history to uncover the omnipresent longing, apathy, and fear endemic to the twenty-first century.

In exploring feminity, queerness, and disability, Empire Builder's twenty-four prose poems weave between urban and rural infrastructure, colonized land, museum exhibitions, scientific developments, mass media, liminal spaces, and linear and circular time to construct an intimate memoir of the Pacific Northwest, and its threads to each corner of the world.

Which is to say that Empire Builder is coming-of-age against a backdrop of state violence, dichotomies of innovation / destruction, and growing inequality along intersectional lines. Permeated by the weight of three generations, struck through with the hope and grief of mundanity.

Jinyi Qu is a Chinese immigrant, queer activist, and disability scholar. Lately, she's been shoegazing on the banks of Vancouver, sifting through vinegar-infested film archives, and whispering Kate Bush lyrics on the train. Empire Builder is her debut poetry collection.