Category Archives: Publications

Publications

“The Whale” Reviewed in the Wilds

Reneé Bibby has reviewed my Moby Dick-inspired poem, “The Whale” in the WILDS, and I couldn’t be more pleased and grateful! Here’s just a snippet of what she shared:

…Line breaks and caesura evoke the voice of an animal, an ancient creature of the deep, breaching the line of water to sing a response, an ode to the inextricable intertwining of fates between animal and man.

You can read the full review here, and if you missed out on reading the poem itself before, you can wander over to Frontier Poetry to read it here.

I’ve also noted that a couple favorite lines are making the rounds on Tumblr (oh my goodness, nearly 1000 likes??), for which I am also quite grateful! A poet always hopes her words will inspire others! ❤

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Publications

The Role of the Outsider in Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko (Ploughshares blog)

I recently published a new essay, “The Role of the Outsider in Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko“ on the Ploughshares blog. This book was on the National Book Award shortlist for 2017, deservedly so. It is a multigenerational family saga about a Korean family that moves to Osaka, Japan, in the early twentieth century and then lives there through the World War years and beyond. It’s painful, honest, and beautiful, and I cannot recommend it enough.

When Pachinko by Min Jin Lee opens in Japan-occupied Korea in 1910 with Hoonie, whose cleft palate and twisted foot lead the village girls to avoid him, the significance of his physical appearance to the overall themes of the novel is not immediately apparent. Hoonie’s hardworking, kind nature and his family’s successful inn eventually produce an opportunity for him to marry Yangjin, an impoverished young woman from a tenant-farming family. As the novel progresses, characters who are “marked” appear more and more frequently. The marks relegate these characters, who all fall within one family tree, to outsider status. Continue reading…

In case it’s not obvious from some of my previous posts, I’ve been reading a lot of books set in Korea and by Korean authors lately. I’m so grateful to see so many of these books coming out (some in translation, some written in English) because Korea has too often been neglected by the literary establishment in spite of its fascinating place in the real world. I’ve learned so much, and look forward to reading and learning more, since there are a number of forthcoming titles already on my to-be-read list for 2018.

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Publications

“The Whale” (Frontier Poetry)

One of my personal favorite poems, “The Whale,” has been published by Frontier Poetry here. This is what they had to say about it, which just makes me incredibly happy!

Cassandra Farrin’s poem rustles with the sound of waves and devils. “The Whale” is exactly how you make surprising a literary figure so well known as to be automatically cliche in lesser hands. Let the lines fill your mouth with brine and flame, the white space like gaps between the waves, the Whale: freshly ambiguous.

And here is a small excerpt:

Born bright, a lemon jarred     in brine and oil pales;
so it was with me     in the deep,
but this is a darker matter.     Say of me “men dream and drown,”
an unfathomable vastness, adrift.     Who lives who impales the moon?
Continue reading…

Thank you to Frontier Poetry for publishing this poem about one of my favorite literary figures of all time!

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Book Reviews, Publications

Loving the Stranger Beside You (Ploughshares Blog)

My article “Loving the Stranger Beside You: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian“ has been posted on the Ploughshares blog! I -loved- this eerie, beautiful book. Here’s a snippet of what I had to say about it:

In The Vegetarian, a collection of three linked novellas, author Han Kang creates and then protects an open moral space between Yeong-hye’s sudden conversion to vegetarianism and her family’s perception of it. Is Yeong-hye wrong to become such an extreme vegetarian that she eventually tries to subsist on nothing but sunlight and water? Is she crazy? Is she selfish? Are her family members wrong to respond as they do to her radical decision?

Each novella is told from a different point of view: Yeong-hye’s husband Mr. Cheong, then her brother-in-law, then her sister In-hye. What can be known of Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism is pieced together little by little, from narrator to narrator: She has a recurring, violent dream of eating raw meat. She and her sister sometimes have flashbacks to violent moments in their childhood, such as the time her family killed and consumed a dog that bit Yeong-hye. Yeong-hye is diagnosed with schizophrenia, but the doctors don’t understand why she refuses to eat. Yeong-hye wants to turn into a tree. Yeong-hye doesn’t want to sleep with her husband because he smells like meat, but she will sleep with her sister’s husband when he paints flowers on her body. She believes trees hug the earth with roots like arms, so she, too, balances in a handstand for as long as possible, saying, “All the trees of the world are like brothers and sisters.” Continue reading…

Han Kang is a South Korean writer who won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 for this book. I am looking forward to reading her latest book Human Acts, which continues to explore how societal violence is expressed in a single person’s life (in this case, the death of a student during a student uprising).

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Book Reviews, Publications

From the Ghosts’ Point of View (Ploughshares blog)

My essay, “From the Ghosts’ Point of View: A Brief History of Seven Killings” is now available on the Ploughshares blog. Thanks for reading! Related: the featured image on this blog post comes from David Burnett’s gorgeous photo essay found here, from the same era during which the events in A Brief History of Seven Killings take place.

In a book that promises by its very title and opening lines that many characters will be expected to die, the author has to do some coaxing to convince readers that they can invest emotionally in the story. Marlon James achieves this in A Brief History of Seven Killings by breaking the sound barrier of the grave. Readers often don’t know whether a character is still alive or dead until after the character has already been talking for a while. That very open-endedness makes it possible to empathize with these characters even after the (more than) seven promised killings take place.

Marlon James is unafraid to confront death from the first page onward and then invite readers to care anyway. Clues to practically every death in the 686-page book appear in those first few pages: “fifty-six bullets,” “a burned cockroach,” a scream that “stops right at the gate of his teeth.” In sharing this, I’m giving away nothing that James himself doesn’t already give away. Reader, you’ve been warned. But, reader, don’t shy away. This is a story with heart.

From the moment the first narrator, Sir Arthur Jennings, announces in his opening lines that ghosts “never stop talking” and that “when you’re dead speech is nothing but tangents and detours,” readers cannot be certain they are listening to someone alive or dead. The readers figuratively take the role of the living who “sometimes hear” the dead speaking when they are half-awake or near death themselves. Continue reading…

Since reading A Brief History of Seven Killings earlier this year, this book shot up to my “top 5” favorites list. It is an incredible accomplishment, driven almost entirely by voice rather than by a traditional plot. Needless to say, I am now dying to read his forthcoming African fantasy trilogy, which also let’s the cat out of the bag about a death, while still inviting readers to care:

“The very, very basic plot is [that] this slave trader hires a bunch of mercenaries to track down a kid who may have been kidnapped,” he told the US magazine in an interview. “But finding him takes nine years, and at the end of it, the kid is dead. And the whole novel is trying to figure out: ‘How did this happen?’”

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Publications

“Elijah” & “The Arrival” (Heartwood)

My two poems “Elijah” and “The Arrival” have been published in Issue 4 of Heartwood Literary Magazine, which is run by the MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College.

Elijah

Sere bends the light
where no dew pearled
this morning
and won’t the next—

[Continue reading…]

The Arrival

Whatever it is,
hold it like the pope
is bleeding in Constantinople,
like Pompeii
in the hungry hours.

[Continue reading…]

Both of these poems are part of a larger project of retelling early Christian apocrypha, myths, and so on, which someday I hope will become a full book of poetry. “The Arrival” was drafted in one of the poetry workshops I attended at The Cabin in Idaho, inspired by my visit to Pompeii back in 2008 during my Fulbright year. Thanks, as always, for reading and supporting my work!

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Publications

“Grass Fire” (Kettle Blue Review)

My poem “Grass Fire” was published today in Kettle Blue Review with amazing poems by Maggie Smith, Francine Witte, and other poets I admire! To say I’m pleased to feature in an issue alongside them is an understatement.

Ovid should have written into his heavens,
how fire gathers wind
fiber, thread, and strand
and snaps it rhythmically in taut cords over chastened fields,
an industrial grade cat-o-nine
hissing through the atmosphere…

[Continue reading]

This poem is based on an actual grass fire on my mom’s farm. The photo on this blog post is also from that fire, which was terrifying. Never underestimate how quickly a fire can move! Thankfully my mom didn’t lose her house, in spite of the damage done to the rest of the land around it.

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Publications

“The First Jews of San Antonio” Among Winners of San Antonio’s 30 Poems for the Tricentennial Contest

I am beyond delighted to share that my poem, “The First Jews of San Antonio,” is among those selected for San Antonio’s 30 Poems for the Tricentennial poetry contest. The selected poems will be interpreted into 2D works of art by local artists and designers to be installed in the City of San Antonio’s Culture Commons Gallery for a special exhibit. The winners also receive a $250 prize and publication.

Thank you to judges Rodney Gomez, Patricia Spears Jones, Urayoán Noel, and Sasha West for choosing my poem!! I’ll let everybody know where they can read the poem along with event details as soon as I have them.

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Publications

Disgust and Tenderness in Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You (Ploughshares)

My essay “Disgust and Tenderness in Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You,” was published today on the Ploughshares blog! You can read it here.

Garth Greenwell’s debut novel What Belongs to You is a beautiful and heartbreaking meditation on how we learn to fill the emotional space between ourselves and others. The unnamed narrator is an American teacher in Bulgaria whose coming-out experiences as a teenage boy in the South indelibly shape his relationships with others later in life.

Yet, it would be falsely reductive to label this book as somehow limited in its interests to gay experience; the loneliness and the struggle to reach out, to touch other human beings, belongs to all of us. Indeed, one of Greenwell’s successes in this book is the ability to subvert common tropes of shame and disgust around homosexuality, and expose an original tenderness, a vulnerability underneath, that we all share.

In the opening chapter, after the narrator experiences his first small betrayal by a younger Bulgarian man named Mitko, he reflects, “There’s something theatrical in all our embraces, I think, as we weigh our responses against those we perceive or project; always we desire too much or not enough, and compensate accordingly.” But romantic attraction is only an entry-point into this question for Greenwell, who guides his narrative gracefully through the narrator’s strained memories of his father, meandering walks through the Bulgarian landscape, and encounters with strangers in a hospital and on a train. Continue reading

There is so much I love about this book, and I was only able to write about a sliver of it. I hope you’ll pick up a copy and read it next time you wander through the bookstore!

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Publications

Notes on a Modern Cinderella (concīs)

My curious little prose poem, “Notes on a Modern Cinderella,” has been published in concīs today! You can read the full poem — and hear me read it aloud! — by clicking here.

This version will not be as ugly as poor Berlioz who slipped on sunflower oil at the turnstile, the one who fell under the train steered by a Komsomol girl. Let’s say worse than the Grimms’ toes but not so horrendous as heads. … continue reading

This was a poem composed in workshop with the lovely Kerri Webster, who challenged us to write a meta-poem about another writing project of ours. Thank you as always for supporting my work and one of my favorite poetry sites!

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