Books by Michael Leong
CONTESTED RECORDS accounts for why so many contemporary poets have turned to source material, fro... more CONTESTED RECORDS accounts for why so many contemporary poets have turned to source material, from newspapers to governmental records, as inspiration for their poetry. Synthesizing research in social ontology, cultural memory studies, art history, public sphere theory, and the history of the humanities, CONTESTED RECORDS argues that poems driven by the remixing and reframing of found texts powerfully engage with the collective ways we remember, forget, and remember again. Going well beyond Wordsworthian recollections in tranquility, authors of such research-driven and mnemotechnic work use previous inscriptions as a springboard into public intellectualism and social engagement. This is the first book-length study to examine conceptual writing and documentary poetry under the same cover, showing how diverse writers associated with different poetry communities have a common interest in documentation. Putting into provocative conversation writers such as Amiri Baraka, Kenneth Goldsmith, R.B. Kitaj, Mark Nowak, M. NourbeSe Philip, Vanessa Place, and Claudia Rankine, I analyze a range of twenty-first-century poems that have been reviled, celebrated, or in some cases met with equally telling indifference. In doing so, I offer nuanced and non-polemical treatments of some of the most controversial debates about race and ethnicity in twenty-first century literary culture.
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co•im•press, 2020
Co-translation of Temblor de cielo/Tremblement de ciel with Ignacio Infante. Inspired by the lege... more Co-translation of Temblor de cielo/Tremblement de ciel with Ignacio Infante. Inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde, Vicente Huidobro’s Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven is a stunning prose poem driven by a relentless seismic energy that takes metaphor-making and image-building to unimaginable heights. Originally published in Madrid in 1931 under the title Temblor de cielo and in Paris in 1932 as Tremblement de ciel, this groundbreaking text stands as one of the most significant bilingual poems of twentieth-century letters. Part love poem, part surrealist narrative, and part philosophical treatise, Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven is intimately connected to Huidobro’s better-known masterwork Altazor (1931) and stands as a major achievement in Latin American avant-garde poetry, again proving Huidobro’s stature among the four giants of Chilean poetry, where he stands shoulder to shoulder with Nobel laureates Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, as well as his contemporary avant-gardist Pablo de Rokha. Released here for the first time in a trilingual edition with a translation that takes into account both the Spanish and French originals in its Englishing, Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven allows translators Ignacio Infante and Michael Leong to bring Huidobro’s dynamic and wildly inventive poetic flights to new readers with verve and savvy. Not for the faint of heart and not to be missed!
http://www.coimpress.com/books/sky_quake.shtml
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Black Square Editions, 2018
Leong superimposes the following layers onto the reader's experience of his latest contemporary p... more Leong superimposes the following layers onto the reader's experience of his latest contemporary poems: politics, chaos, hilarity, language, meaning and camouflage. He uses language to show us all how language is used to manipulate everything we experience.
"Working out a necessary and constantly evolving counterintuition—uneasy, agitated, restless and ceaselessly inventive—Michael Leong’s Words on Edge clocks the alarm of those who 'wake late' in a world of fragments and found materials. Bricoleur of the 'jagged, ad hoc equation' that is the contemporary, the poet constellates a spacious, ever-enlarging structure from a heap of broken posterities to make space for 'the first blossoms of wild meaning.' The assertions are fresh, tragicomic, and engaging, and the ongoing effort to accurately describe (and affect) a transforming situation is thrilling: this is work that leads us toward 'a future collapse into / a full state of wakefulness.' Don’t wait!"
--Laura Mullen
"Michael Leong’s poetry is exquisite. We say something is exquisite when it is alluring and elegant, but also when it is razor-fine, when it has an edge, and that edge might be used to slice open a section of air and pull something out of it that hadn’t existed before, something that we did not know existed, something that existed outside of language and was conjured into being by an unorthodox employment of that very same language. This is called invention, and can lead to great and wonderful things, what André Breton would call the marvelous.”
--John Olson
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Fence Digital, 2017
Who Unfolded My Origami Brain? is a collection of 99 fragments, aphorisms, and typographic poems.... more Who Unfolded My Origami Brain? is a collection of 99 fragments, aphorisms, and typographic poems. By turns gnomic, rhetorically playful, lyric, and apocalyptic, these distilled and minimalist texts were painstakingly typeset and printed by hand with a Trodat 5253 Self-Inking Custom Stamp, a mechanism that accommodates three and four millimeter rubber type. The goal of Leong's ascetic practice of "stenography" (literally meaning "narrow writing") was to impress a surface, to put it "under an impression" (in the way one is "put under" hypnosis). The poems were then transmediated and transformed to create a visually striking blend of digital and analog textures. The color-coded pages of the book feature special buttons that allow for multiple pathways of reading: Who Unfolded My Origami Brain? is a hypertextual, hypermaterial experience.
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Winner of a 2012 FACE OUT grant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. In the tradit... more Winner of a 2012 FACE OUT grant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. In the tradition of William Burroughs’ cut-ups and avant-garde collage, Michael Leong’s new book-length poem dismantles and re-sutures three disparate sources: T.S. Eliot’s classic essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Wikipedia articles about the chemical elements, and the periodic table. The result is a visually striking array of typographic forms and an explosive fusion of dictions. Clever in both concept and compositional execution, Cutting Time with a Knife is a bold experiment that explores the limits of invention, authorship, and originality.
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Winner of a 2013 &Now Award. The Philosophy… is, in the words of the author, “a genetic splicing... more Winner of a 2013 &Now Award. The Philosophy… is, in the words of the author, “a genetic splicing of two classic essays on composition.” Using Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) and Stein’s “Composition as Explanation” (1926), Michael Leong has “lifted out individual words and phrases from the two source texts and used them to slowly accrete linked assemblages of verbal tesserae” and, in the process, intentionally constructed a novel work of constraint–based, conceptual poetics. It enacts the phenomenology of finding language, of imagination-at-work, while performing a critique of editorial and authorial ethics.
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Michael Leong’s debut collection of poetry draws on various forms and strategies such as anagrams... more Michael Leong’s debut collection of poetry draws on various forms and strategies such as anagrams, acrostics, pangrams, typographic play, use of found text, and prose poetry to explore alternative and poetic forms of perception. Crosshatched by competing signals (voices from the street, the speech of politicians, broadcasts from pirate transmissions, catcalls both literal and figurative, idioms from other languages), it is a deeply imaginative book that demonstrates both the frustration and frisson of communicating in a global, postmodern age. At turns surreal, conceptual, and experimental, these poems always adhere to a pleasurable principle of lyric musicality.
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Chapbooks by Michael Leong
The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, 2019
#10 in "Among the Neighbors," a pamphlet series dedicated to the study of little magazines from 1... more #10 in "Among the Neighbors," a pamphlet series dedicated to the study of little magazines from 1940 and after.
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Epigraph , 2018
Police Lineups is an abecedarian series that, in forcing a linkage between graphemic and social d... more Police Lineups is an abecedarian series that, in forcing a linkage between graphemic and social differentiation, puts the formalism of typographical/concrete poetry within a conceptual frame.
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Belladonna*, 2015
Li Po (701-762), also known as Li T’ai-po or Li Bai, is one of the most renowned poets of the Hig... more Li Po (701-762), also known as Li T’ai-po or Li Bai, is one of the most renowned poets of the High T’ang period, the so-called Golden Age of Chinese poetry. Translated by such illustrious poets as Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams, Li Po’s writing—however mediated and refracted—exerted a considerable influence on American modernist poetics, and the early twentieth-century reception of his poetry helped pave the way for Imagism’s anti-decorative compression and minimalism. Yet how much do we really know about Li Po and his work? According to translator David Hinton, Li Po is “as much unknown as known, as much legend as history.” Out of the several thousand poems that Li Po supposedly authored, only about a thousand remain and many of the extant poems are of questionable authenticity. In the face of such loss and uncertainty, Hinton suggests that we, in fact, “re-embody the legend that Li Po is…even if that legend has little to do with historical fact.” “Li Po Meets Oulipo” explores other forms that this re-embodiment might take by appropriating translations of Li Po’s surviving writings by using a range of Oulipian procedures. If, as Michel Foucault provocatively stated, “the author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning,” then legend, by contrast, is a privileged conduit for proliferating significations. I wish to bring together the poetry of Li Po and the procedural ingenuity of Oulipo to create a provocative proliferation of meanings that can stand in—however incongruously—for the enormous amount of Li Po’s writings that have been lost. The Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature potentielle [Workshop of Potential Literature]) is a neo-avant-garde group founded in 1960 by former surrealist Raymond Queneau and mathematician, engineer, and pataphysician François Le Lionnais. Oulipo members included such luminaries as Marcel Duchamp, Italo Calvino, and Georges Perec. As a conglomeration of mathematicians and writers, the still-active Oulipo group is interested in both theorizing and engineering literary forms based on extreme restrictions and rule-bound procedures. For example, the basic algorithm “N + 7”—perhaps the most famous of all Oulipian constraints—involves replacing each noun of a source poem with the seventh subsequent noun in a specified dictionary. What follows are the results of my experimentation with N + 7 along with eight other constraints, part of my ongoing search of how one text can lead (in)directly to the next. Queneau famously described Oulipians as “rats who build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape.” This chapbook begins and ends in the labyrinth for it is, to quote Chinese fabulist Can Xue (who has written a book on Calvino), “an experiment without an escape route.”
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Burnside Review Press, Mar 2015
Winner of the 2014 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. Chosen by Hannah Gamble.
“Michael Leong’s... more Winner of the 2014 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. Chosen by Hannah Gamble.
“Michael Leong’s vocabulary is totally stuffed/ multiplying in mirrors/ scattered over hillsides/ bubbling right over the top, and he’s going to give it all to you—he’s generous. He’s generous and funny and a little troubled—and “a little troubled” is, of course, the most logical and authentic response we could hope for anyone who’s examining life and poetry and personhood and artist-ness. This book is so enjoyable—like I said, giving and funny, but also very unlike anything I’ve read lately. It promptly wins the reader over.”
-Hannah Gamble
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Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2010
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Papers by Michael Leong
The Hopkins Review , 2024
Essay on Evie Shockley, Divya Victor, Nathaniel Mackey, and John Yau commissioned for a special f... more Essay on Evie Shockley, Divya Victor, Nathaniel Mackey, and John Yau commissioned for a special folio on “Locating a Collective Lyric I,” edited by Leila Easa and Jennifer Stager.
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Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Poetry, ed. Timothy Yu (Cambridge University Press) , 2021
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Verge: Studies in Global Asias , 2019
Short essay commissioned for a special portfolio on "Forgetting Wars," edited by Tina Chen, Josep... more Short essay commissioned for a special portfolio on "Forgetting Wars," edited by Tina Chen, Josephine Park, and We Jung Yi.
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Journal of Modern Literature, 2018
Conceptual poetry, widely considered to be one of the twenty-first century's preeminent avant-gar... more Conceptual poetry, widely considered to be one of the twenty-first century's preeminent avant-gardes, is now under attack. Kenneth Goldsmith's failed performance "The Body of Michael Brown" has thrown conceptualism into crisis-especially in regards to the racial politics of appropriation. Nevertheless, works such as M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! and Claudia Rankine's Citizen show how conceptual techniques can effectively respond to racial traumas. Similarly, Chilean poet Carlos Soto Román's textual appropriations protest against state-sponsored murder and suggest new modes of political critique from the global South. Moving beyond a North American context and disentangling the conceptualisms of the movement's most high-profile practitioners from late conceptual projects by writers of color demonstrate how conceptual poetry is not dying, as some claim, but evolving along different lines of lineage.
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Denver Quarterly, 2020
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Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, 2018
This essay details the process of composing the electronic collection of poetry Who Unfolded My O... more This essay details the process of composing the electronic collection of poetry Who Unfolded My Origami Brain?, which was published by Fence Digital, a new imprint of Fence Books. By contextualizing my e-book with Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's ideas of immediacy and hypermediacy, I challenge the facile but enduring opposition between the sensuous materiality of print culture and the supposed dematerialization of digital culture.
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ARCADE: Literature, the Humanities, & the World, 2017
Statement of poetics published in the “Locating Contemporary Asian American Poetry” Colloquy, eds... more Statement of poetics published in the “Locating Contemporary Asian American Poetry” Colloquy, eds. Brian Reed and Kornelia Freitag.
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Books by Michael Leong
http://www.coimpress.com/books/sky_quake.shtml
"Working out a necessary and constantly evolving counterintuition—uneasy, agitated, restless and ceaselessly inventive—Michael Leong’s Words on Edge clocks the alarm of those who 'wake late' in a world of fragments and found materials. Bricoleur of the 'jagged, ad hoc equation' that is the contemporary, the poet constellates a spacious, ever-enlarging structure from a heap of broken posterities to make space for 'the first blossoms of wild meaning.' The assertions are fresh, tragicomic, and engaging, and the ongoing effort to accurately describe (and affect) a transforming situation is thrilling: this is work that leads us toward 'a future collapse into / a full state of wakefulness.' Don’t wait!"
--Laura Mullen
"Michael Leong’s poetry is exquisite. We say something is exquisite when it is alluring and elegant, but also when it is razor-fine, when it has an edge, and that edge might be used to slice open a section of air and pull something out of it that hadn’t existed before, something that we did not know existed, something that existed outside of language and was conjured into being by an unorthodox employment of that very same language. This is called invention, and can lead to great and wonderful things, what André Breton would call the marvelous.”
--John Olson
Chapbooks by Michael Leong
“Michael Leong’s vocabulary is totally stuffed/ multiplying in mirrors/ scattered over hillsides/ bubbling right over the top, and he’s going to give it all to you—he’s generous. He’s generous and funny and a little troubled—and “a little troubled” is, of course, the most logical and authentic response we could hope for anyone who’s examining life and poetry and personhood and artist-ness. This book is so enjoyable—like I said, giving and funny, but also very unlike anything I’ve read lately. It promptly wins the reader over.”
-Hannah Gamble
Papers by Michael Leong
http://www.coimpress.com/books/sky_quake.shtml
"Working out a necessary and constantly evolving counterintuition—uneasy, agitated, restless and ceaselessly inventive—Michael Leong’s Words on Edge clocks the alarm of those who 'wake late' in a world of fragments and found materials. Bricoleur of the 'jagged, ad hoc equation' that is the contemporary, the poet constellates a spacious, ever-enlarging structure from a heap of broken posterities to make space for 'the first blossoms of wild meaning.' The assertions are fresh, tragicomic, and engaging, and the ongoing effort to accurately describe (and affect) a transforming situation is thrilling: this is work that leads us toward 'a future collapse into / a full state of wakefulness.' Don’t wait!"
--Laura Mullen
"Michael Leong’s poetry is exquisite. We say something is exquisite when it is alluring and elegant, but also when it is razor-fine, when it has an edge, and that edge might be used to slice open a section of air and pull something out of it that hadn’t existed before, something that we did not know existed, something that existed outside of language and was conjured into being by an unorthodox employment of that very same language. This is called invention, and can lead to great and wonderful things, what André Breton would call the marvelous.”
--John Olson
“Michael Leong’s vocabulary is totally stuffed/ multiplying in mirrors/ scattered over hillsides/ bubbling right over the top, and he’s going to give it all to you—he’s generous. He’s generous and funny and a little troubled—and “a little troubled” is, of course, the most logical and authentic response we could hope for anyone who’s examining life and poetry and personhood and artist-ness. This book is so enjoyable—like I said, giving and funny, but also very unlike anything I’ve read lately. It promptly wins the reader over.”
-Hannah Gamble