#underblong

[sleepingpoetry]

Master of No Chill dates the Superintendent of Chest Pain County who’s married to a forest turned endless blaze who’s fucking a planet eighty percent gilded ash— that part’s a mess but the body’s more riddle than liar. The body is just information.  Breath nowhere breath vanished means  I miss you, please touch me. Sometimes more  I miss touch, sometimes more you please me.  More please me. More you and you and you are more than bomb shelters, let’s baba a village,  warm our bodies back to real hearthed homes. But where’s the love poem for me, my partner,  their partner, our lovers and their rented doms?  No hymns, no church. Shoulders our altars. Like everything we need, impossible.  Then imagined. Then desired. Then made by trembling hands.  Gods bless the houses this love builds.

– Kemi Alabi, Polyamory Defense #324

#kemi alabi #underblong #poetry #poem #love #polyamory #desire

[fiercynn]

palestinian poets: leena aboutaleb

leena aboutaleb is an egyptian-palestinian currently based in amman. her writing has appeared in third text online, mizna, LIFTA volumes, poetry london, the chestnut review, and others. her chapbook ‘Expeditions of Projection’ was published by VIBE in 2022, a press based in belfast, ireland. she was a guest editor of the palestine print issue alongside zaina alsous for sumou, where they worked inside and along the lineage and practice of palestinian memory.   she is an M.A. graduate in media and strategic communications from the george washington university, where she focused on palestinian temporality and language-making. her thesis ‘Is-Was: Temporalities, Hauntings and Al-Faragh’ was formally published in january 2022, observing the temporal livelihood of symbols in the making of palestinian language.

IF YOU READ JUST ONE POEM BY LEENA ABOUTALEB, MAKE IT THIS ONE

OTHER POEMS ONLINE I LOVE BY LEENA ABOUTALEB

ontologies at the boiler journal

LIBERATION IS ROTTING IN YOUR FIGS at fiyah lit magazine

it's a britney mo(u)rning at violet indigo blue etc (VIBE)

of a coming world at BAHR // بح

art exhibition: west bank girl on fire at strange horizons (also read aloud)

KUN FAYAKUN at the hunger

LOOK: 7odood Briefs! at anomaly

yeah maybe I'm still in luv w u at underblong

#leena aboutaleb #poetry #free palestine #palestinian poets series

[kitchen-light]

It’s hard enough to move around in the world as a body that invites scrutiny, the presumption of intimacy, and motivated ‘interest,’ you know? So I do think there is something about the gap in the lyric as enabling, also, the impossibility of closeness between writer and reader that I appreciate, that allows me to write poems at all.

Cameron Awkward-Rich, from “Cameron Awkward-Rich | Interview by Mag Gabbert”, Underblong, Issue 4 

#cameron awkward-rich #cameron awkward rich #quotes #interviews #words #found* #on poetry #on the body

[discoidal]

a poem from underblong by Uma Jagwani; a reminder of the dark times we're still in

#poetry #chen chen #pandemic / #*sets queue on fire*

[spiritunwilling]

when i think trans i think BiG L O GiSTICS TRUCK poem of all time

[theficti0nfreak]

Before I was a girl, I was an accusation. A bad omen. A piece of gum stuck to the bottom of my mother's boot.

Ally Ang. "Anti-Ode to Girlhood," published in Underblong

[mothmacks]

hello!! saw your intro post and i am extremely interested in looking at your work. please ????

omg yes i would love to share!! here is some of my work that is available online. some of these poems use my deadname bc they r a lil older and publishing is weird but i love all these poems dearly. <3

this is my most recent publication it's called boggle & it is a poem abt my pet rats who were lesbian lovers

then we have my dissociative fruit poem from my school's lit mag

and, finally (for now), here is an ooooooold poem i wrote when i was a teen that i still think is p cool

much love to all of these presses and to you for being interested in my work !! i hope u like the poems <3

#poetry #macks writes #queer #heheheh #thank u again rion for the ask #*heart emoji*

[therehavebeenstranger]

Befuckled 

by Josh Tvrdy

Nickel my tipples.  Piff my snit.  Bondle my falls.  Pound my see-see with a metal straw.  Miss in my powth.  Huck my foal while you bub my rack  with lemon-oil.  Muck fee. Muck fee  raw. Burrow inside  my petty swits with your tongue. Hum  in my coal. Make me  your dewman humpster, your dum-cump,  your gayby burl  your piggy. Hull my pear.  Night my beck.  Tither your slung inside my ear  and fack me with your jeet. Call me  bunny-hair, chide sick,  your bexiest soy. Babe,  shove your pretty case inside my frack  and feast.

(via underblong)

#national poetry month #day 2 #yeah day 1 and day 2 are getting posted on the same day #which is what happens when you forget it's april until it's nighttime on the first #anyway this poem is great because it's obviously fun and silly and sexy #but then if you take the time on second read to closely attend to like. what the “mixed-up” words actually are #idk #this poem leaves me with this melancholy !!!!!!!! #it's great that it can do all these things!

[revmeg]

“Suppose you live a long life.... ....Suppose, a life so long & gorgeously  silly, viewers will complain about everything left out from your biopic...” - “The School of You” by Chen Chen (one of my fav poems in the book so I’m linking to it in full)

#Chen Chen #Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency #poetry #lit

[psitrend]

Interview with Chen Chen, author, and poet

New Post has been published on https://china-underground.com/2018/12/30/interview-with-chen-chen-author-and-poet/

Interview with Chen Chen, author, and poet

CHEN CHEN born in Xiamen, China, is an American poet who grew up in Massachusetts.

After graduating from Newton North High School, he received his B.A. in creative writing and Asian/Pacific/American Studies at Hampshire College in 2011, and his M.F.A. from Syracuse University in 2014.

Chen is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in English and creative writing at Texas Tech University, where he is a part-time instructor in composition.

He received in 2017 National Book Awards. He wrote Set the Garden on Fire (Porkbelly Press, 2015) and Kissing the Sphinx (Two of Cups Press, 2016).

His work has appeared in Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, Drunken Boat, Best of the Net, The Best American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities was a finalist for the Lambda literary award for gay poetry.

Official site | Amazon | Twitter

Interview by Dominique Musorrafiti

This is a selected interview from Planet China Vol. 05 issue

China-underground: What motivated you to start writing? When did you understand your passion for poetry?

Chen Chen: I’ve known since second grade that I wanted to become a writer of some kind. Throughout elementary school, during recess, I would get my friends to act out skits with me on the playground.

These make-believe sessions were based on TV shows and movies, often with my own additional characters or plot twists thrown in.

I would jot down ideas for future skits, sometimes spinning these into short stories.

Eventually, more and more of my own world-building occurred, took over.

As my friends moved on to playing “real games” like soccer or basketball, I kept dreaming up scenarios and increasingly, playing them out on the page.

In middle school, I got obsessed with the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer and thought for a while I’d become a TV writer (maybe I’ll still write for TV at some point, who knows).

I loved and continue to love the kind of long-form, serial storytelling that a TV show can do.

In high school, I started to write poetry more seriously—outside of English class assignments, though it was fantastic, dedicated English teachers who encouraged me and looked at my drafts and guided me through my early attempts at rigorous revision.

I feel extremely lucky that I had these English teachers who spent time with me during lunch and after school, talking with me about poetry, what I was reading, what I was writing.

Also lucky: the amazing public library I frequented during my high school years—the Newton Free Library in Newton, MA.

I checked out so many poetry books by contemporary poets who are still my influences today: Margaret Atwood, Louise Glück, Li-Young Lee, Robert Hass, and others.

I also read translations of the Dao De Jing and other works of Chinese as well as Japanese philosophy.

It wasn’t until my third year of college, though, that I started to focus primarily on writing poetry.

Up to that point, I wrote both fiction and poetry, and more fiction.

It was taking workshops with Heather Madden and Aracelis Girmay at Hampshire College as well as with Martín Espada at UMass Amherst that really shifted things—changed my life.

I fell in love with the process of working on a poem for hours and hours, trying to get every line, every image strangely right, fully alive.

Chen Chen. Author: Keegan Lester

Who influenced you as a person and poet?

My family, both blood and chosen.

And with particular gratitude to my friends Sam Herschel Wein and Mag Gabbert, who have been really important first/trusted readers for my work.

I love trading poems with them, talking about craft alongside our specific visions, our specific hopes for what a poem can do.

Sam and I also collaborate on a number of projects: a joint chapbook, a journal called Underblong, outfit decisions, etc.

My teachers, including graduate school teachers whom I haven’t mentioned yet—especially Bruce Smith, Michael Burkard, Christopher Kennedy, and Minnie Bruce Pratt during my MFA… and especially Curtis Bauer and Jill Patterson during my PhD.

My partner Jeff Gilbert and our pug dog, Mr. Rupert Giles (named after a Buffy character, of course). My community through Kundiman, an organization that nurtures Asian American writers, supports Asian American literature.

And with great love to Cofounders Sarah Gambito and Joseph O. Legaspi, to Executive Director Cathy Linh Che. And the friends, the family I’ve made through Kundiman, including Monica Sok, Muriel Leung, Janine Joseph, Michelle Lin, Kazumi Chin, Swati Khurana, and Jennifer S. Cheng.

Chen Chen. Author: Keegan Lester

Did you find any difficulties or obstacles to express your points of view at the beginning?

For a while, I kept trying to write like the poets who most influenced me, such as Louise Glück and Li-Young Lee.

But I was trying too hard to be a serious poet, writing about very serious things in a sort of spare, recognizably “high lyric” way. Sometimes I would write much more conversational poems that used a lot of humor, but I didn’t give those poems as much weight or really think of myself as a poet who could be funny and serious at the same time.

It took time for me to see how much more alive my poems were when I allowed a kind of language that was closer to the way I talk with friends, with people I love.

In graduate school, I returned to poems by Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara, by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ross Gay, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Mary Ruefle.

And I saw and valued more the comedic moments in work by Glück and Lee. The play and imagination in these poems led to weird new work of my own. Halfway through my MFA, I started to embrace an approach to writing that felt more wacky, more true, and more me.

Another kind of difficulty, set of difficulties: growing up gay with deeply homophobic parents… and growing up as the child of Chinese immigrants in predominantly white school environments.

I don’t want to simplify things here—I also experienced and continue to experience homophobia from white folks, too. Much of my poetry is autobiographical and explores these confrontations with homophobia, xenophobia, and racism.

Sometimes straight white classmates in creative writing classes have misunderstood my work or been dismissive of it. I’ve had to push through those unhelpful comments.

Finding and building community outside of writing programs has been crucial. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said that falling in love with poetry was a life-changing event.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that becoming friends with fellow queer poets of color has been life-saving.

What message do you want to communicate with your works?

I don’t think there’s anyone message I want to communicate.

I hope there’s a range of things to glean from my poetry. I love being surprised by a reader’s interpretation. I don’t think a poem really starts to live all it can live until someone else picks it up, carries it around in their own idiosyncratic way.

That’s the magic: the interaction between someone else’s brain and being with this language-creature I’ve made.

What about your book “When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities”? Where the idea come from? How long did it take you to complete it?

This book started as my MFA thesis.

I worked closely with my thesis advisor, Bruce Smith, on the initial version. The title comes from a poem in the collection.

The collection happened poem by poem, over the three years of the MFA, and mostly during the second half of the program.

I started to think about grouping the poems together through working on two different chapbooks—Set the Garden on Fire, which eventually was published in 2015 by Porkbelly Press, and Kissing the Sphinx, which came out in 2016 via Two of Cups Press.

The former chapbook contained very narrative poems, more straightforward autobiography. The latter chapbook had very surreal poems, more fictionalized or just fictional speakers and scenes.

I was working through how to bring these two aesthetic directions together in some way but first had to see them as separate, smaller projects.

My MFA thesis included a handful of poems from both chapbooks and then a great deal of other poems. I wanted the collection to feel expansive, to say something about potential and becoming as a perpetual process, not a thing that ends once you’re an adult.

Growing up goes on and on, in all these surprising ways. And as a queer person of color, I often have to create my own ways forward (and back, too—the kinds of memory, kinds of history that are mine instead of what’s been dictated to or for me).

At the same time, as I said in my last response, I wanted a range of interpretations for the reader, as well. So, I don’t think this book is (about) any one thing.

Post-MFA, I sent the book out to presses. When it won BOA Editions’ A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, the judge for the contest, Jericho Brown, reached out and we worked on revising the manuscript together.

Brown was incredibly generous with his time and really understood the book as a book better than I did—its arc, its shape.

The oldest poem in the book, “Race to the Tree,” I started in college. So if you count that, it took seven years to complete the book. But if we’re starting from when I started assembling these poems as a book, then it’s more like three years.

Do you think that growing in Massachusetts has affected your way of writing?

Yes. I didn’t use to think so.

I used to think I could live anywhere and that I’d be inspired and changed by people, but not the place.

And then I moved to West Texas to do a doctoral program.

It was such an uprooting. I didn’t recognize the landscape, the seasons.

I missed what was familiar to me, growing up in Massachusetts. I missed the trees, the hills, the way the air smells in autumn.

I realized how deeply I’d been shaped by those elements, as a person, and as a poet. If you flip through my book you’ll see all the references to trees and four distinct seasons and snow, lots of snow.

Some of that was also influenced by my time in Syracuse—where I spent three years, for my MFA.

This next collection of poems I’m working on is definitely influenced by the flat, dusty plains of West Texas, and how outside of that landscape I felt while living there… but also the particular beauty of it.

Chen Chen. Author: Jeffrey-Gilbert

Can you share with us a story that inspired you to realize a poetry that became special for you?

I remember reading, for the first time, the poetry of Pablo Neruda, thanks to a class taught by brilliant poet and Neruda expert Martín Espada.

I remember reading the poem “I Explain a Few Things,” which describes Neruda’s aesthetic shift from a detached surrealism to a politically engaged lyricism during the Spanish Civil War. Espada reading this poem out loud to us in his deep, booming voice… and then going back to my dorm room, I read the poem out loud myself… I was changed, through and through, without knowing that I needed this transformation.

Photos courtesy of Chen Chen. The photos were taken in order of appearance by Jess X. Snow, Keegan Lester, Jeffrey Gilbert

#ChinesePoetry, #ChineseWriter

#chinese poetry #Chinese writer

[bostonpoetryslam]

Before I was a girl, I was an accusation. A bad omen. A piece of gum stuck to the bottom of my mother’s boot.

Ally Ang, “Anti-Ode to Girlhood,” published in Underblong

#ally ang #poetry #underblong #gender #girlhood

[mortalpractice]

that part’s a mess but the body’s more riddle than liar. The body is just information.

Kemi Alabi, from “Polyamory Defense #324,” published in Underblong

#poetry #quote #kemi alabi #polyamory defense no. 324 #underblong #excerpt #the body

[fiercynn]

palestinian poets: noor hindi

noor hindi (she/her/hers) is a palestinian-american poet and reporter. her debut collection of poems, Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow was published by haymarket books. she is currently editing a palestinian poetry anthology with george abraham (haymarket books, 2025). she is a 2021 ruth lilly and dorothy sargent rosenberg fellow. follow her on instagram or twitter.

IF YOU READ JUST ONE POEM BY NOOR HINDI, MAKE IT THIS ONE

OTHER POEMS ONLINE THAT I LOVE BY NOOR HINDI

The World’s Loneliest Whale Sings the Loudest Song at split this rock

In Which the White Woman on my Thesis Committee Asks Me about Witness at hobart pulp

Against Death at triquarterly

Poem In Which My Mother Tells Me Not To Do A Pap Smear Because It Might Tear My Nonexistent Hymen at underblong

#poetry #noor hindi #free palestine #palestinian poets series

[kitchen-light]

The why is somewhat hard to articulate, so here is a list: love poem for my friends with an undercurrent of black feeling; the instrusion of ‘the news’; the reaching for something like joy, not despite but because of hurt; revising Richard Siken’s “Snow and Dirty Rain” into a poem that hopes for the flourishing of my people, the ones I know and the ones I will never; faith in poetry to make small rooms of respite, despite all of the evidence of what it fails to do.

Cameron Awkward-Rich, from “Cameron Awkward-Rich | Interview by Mag Gabbert”, Underblong, Issue 4 

#cameron awkward-rich #cameron awkward rich #quotes #interviews #words #found* #on poetry

[discoidal]

any new poems u guys are into? thinking of the latest underblong & travesties press issues rn

#😔😔😔😔

[spiritunwilling]

underblong's is still alive thank god

#Their last open submission period was over a year ago lmbo