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Non-classifiable

echolalia echolalia

by (author) Jane Shi

Publisher
Brick Books
Initial publish date
Oct 2024
Category
NON-CLASSIFIABLE, LGBT, Death
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781771316378
    Publish Date
    Oct 2024
    List Price
    $23.95

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Description

Relentlessly inventive poetry that proclaims a diasporic, queer, and disabled self-hood.

In Jane Shi's echolalia echolalia, commitment and comedy work together to critique ongoing inequities, dehumanizing ideologies, and the body politic. Here are playful and transformative narratives of friendship and estrangement, survival and self-forgiveness. Writing against inherited violence and scarcity-producing colonial projects, Shi expresses a deep belief in one's chosen family, love and justice.

"Shi extends her poetics in all directions with silky skill. Language flourishes in the realm of a poet like this."
- T. Liem, author of Slows: Twice and Obits.

About the author

Contributor Notes

Jane Shi lives on the occupied, stolen, and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. Her writing has appeared in the Disability Visibility Blog, Briarpatch Magazine, The Offing, and Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry (Arsenal Pulp Press), among others. Jane is an alumnus of Tin House Summer Workshop, The Writer's Studio Online at Simon Fraser University, and StoryStudio Chicago. She is the winner of The Capilano Review's 2022 In(ter)ventions in the Archive Contest and the author of the chapbook Leaving Chang'e on Read (Rahila's Ghost Press, 2022). She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land is not mined, hearts are not filched, and bodies are not violated.

Editorial Reviews

"Jane Shi's echolalia echolalia is a gorgeous, sticky griefsong to the body, soaked in loss and nostalgia. These unruly, precise poems sting with rage and betrayal. They usher us through cycles of crisis and childhood, innocence and illusion, while offering us powerful portraits of life-anchoring friendship and community care. These poems twist in form and shape and voice; they are dexterous and intimate. I never knew how much I needed these anti-anthems. They shook me awake."
- Maneo Mohale, author of Everything is a Deathly Flower

"From the tender to the absurd, the poems in this book lovingly agitate and stretch us towards a world that resounds with precise, tenacious life. From mushrooms failing to forget to unabashed magnolias to ancestral humour in contemporary times, echolalia echolalia reorganizes our neural networks and our communities towards living in 'quantum entanglement.' Curiosity and compassion sprout up in the channels and chambers that Shi opens up with rigor and generosity."
- Rita Wong, author of forage and monkeypuzzle

"In this electric, eclectic collection, Jane Shi weaves, ducks, swerves, and composes poems like an acrobat swinging across the distance of time. The book is a virtuosic feat in bending away from, twirling, curling, unfurling from the left margin with lines that electrify. Shi is a poet unlike anyone else, and I welcome any extended stay in their worlds."
- Diana Khoi Nguyen, author Root Fractures and Ghost Of

"echolalia echolalia left me in a state of wonder. Who are we in relation to our echoes and those who we echo? In an exuberant debut, Shi searches for definition and distinction alongside a desire to be connected and multitudinous, asking 'how do you say help me in yr language.' Shi extends her poetics in all directions with silky skill. Language flourishes in the realm of a poet like this."
- T. Liem, author of Slows: Twice and Obits.

"An anthem for the chronically ill and chronically online, echolalia echolalia sings with the complicated queer love we need to keep other alive. These poems are tricksters of form that play rough with colonial grammar, guided by a keen eye for satire that never loses sight of the urgency for marginalized kin to survive on our own terms."
- Rebecca Salazar, author of sulphurtongue