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In the poems of Feng Chen's darkly spellbinding debut collection, Butcher's Tree, the page evokes and provokes legendary creatures, kills them and puts on their skin-then cures the meat. This startling and unusual book is a medium that channels damned and contaminated creatures such as Grendel, Wukong, and Prometheus. It reconsiders what it means to construct a myth; to mold around a hollow space a materiality of shape that depends on contours without content. Life that has no life. These are love poems whose monstrous repetition demystifies these once powerful beings while at the same time plunging deeper into insensible consciousness, where the human ceases to retain its proper form.
In the poems of Feng Chen's darkly spellbinding debut collection, Butcher's Tree, the page evokes and provokes legendary creatures, kills them and puts on their skin-then cures the meat. This startling and unusual book is a medium that channels damned and contaminated creatures such as Grendel, Wukong, and Prometheus. It reconsiders what it means to construct a myth; to mold around a hollow space a materiality of shape that depends on contours without content. Life that has no life. These are love poems whose monstrous repetition demystifies these once powerful beings while at the same time plunging deeper into insensible consciousness, where the human ceases to retain its proper form.
By day, Feng Sun Chen works at a nursing home in Minneapolis, by night she creates biting poetry such as her latest collection, The 8th House (Black Ocean 2015). She is also the author of the book of poetry Butcher's Tree (Black Ocean 2011) and the chapbooks Ugly Fish (Radioactive Moat 2011), Arcane Carnal Knowledge (Mortal Steaks 2012), and blud (Spork Press 2011). She has an MFA from the University of Minnesota and sometimes writes about potatoes and art for Montevidayo.
“Like a thousand tiny teeth gnawing through language’s tender
membranes, Butcher’s Tree eats through the gloom of the visible
world. Nocturnal, feral, and foraging, Chen’s is a poetry whose
‘purity strips the meat from inside.’ Inside these mesmeric vaults,
skins fuse and ‘the cored body’ grows rhizomes, burrowing into
everything. The echolocating clicks and pops of Chen’s alchemical
practice make audible the astounding sound of our own ‘hearts…
growing teeth.’” —Lara Glenum
“Butcher’s Tree is animal, foody, and thick with the materials of
local and ancient and visionary worlds. My favorite parts feel
ripped from the myths and tales and fables I might have known once
upon a time, waving like strange numinous laundry on the line of
Feng Sun Chen.” —Ariana Reines
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