Yongyu Chen, Perennial Counterpart

 

M, it turns out, is thirty-three. At our age they lived in Paris selling feminine hygiene products. They had short hair in winter. In nightclubs they saw

Virginie Despentes, with her then-girlfriend, leaving, clothes trailing behind in macerating trails of light. Open door framing dawn air, welcoming the vinegar dryness.

This gap of ten years is unimaginable. The tart M baked tonight is oily, wonderfully sour.

When I am thirty-three I will be crystal, root systems vulcanized. I will be missed. Woven into the brittle surroundings.

At the party I keep leaving, I sit in the stairwell—what is vivid is the distance. Until I pull out this droplet inside me like violence. Until I harden into the building’s impersonal structure.

G keeps finding me, keeps sitting with me, until I want to return. (“Macerations”)

I was intrigued to see the full-length poetry debut by London-based poet Yongyu Chen, Perennial Counterpart (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2026), a collection assembled into five clusters of expansive and intimately gestural lyric monologues. “Unintelligible to the end. To the end,” begins the opening poem, “unintelligible. // You will not always write. Or, you will always write. // But when I’m dead I will write? Then? // You will not always write. // At some point / some point // at some point the poems will get / better. Then // it will be your expectations, not the poems / that are lacking. Then // you will not write.” Chen’s poems thread across meditative distances, both cinematic and philosophical, and writing on obsession and creative acts, gesture and gratitude, human connection and travel. Chen’s poems provide the sense of lyrics being written to, whether the self, as journal entry, or to another, via the epistolary form, perpetually articulating the dreams and adventures of youth that one might think can never be put away. As the poem “05.24.23,” a piece dedicated “for Gabby,” includes: “We sit with your friend, in early summer, at the blue / café, his face pale & transparent like a medusa. You lean // in. And recede in the eager waves of his speech. I recede, parallel to you. I / do not learn the essential things. I do not // move my hands in cirlces on the wet surface of the essential. I watch the / mark on his face, stable & changing.” Through the Nightboat Books,there’s such a charming interview with Chen on the collection, as conducted by Lucia Kan-Sperling, that begins:

There was no process in writing this book. For a long time I was just working on one poem, over many weeks, & it absorbed all the sentences I made, & felt like a totality—which would be replaced rather than added-to by the next poem. Only recently does it feel like I’m able to write something not total for me, & I enjoy that feeling.

Most of the work in this book is from 2021–2023. I missed my friends since it was the pandemic, & wrote letters to them. I liked the lettery feeling of friendship. Around that time, I read Michel Foucault’s “Friendship as a Way of Life” & felt very attached to it. I was reading many writers for the first time who felt immediately important to me.

The last poems I wrote in the book came from a very different place. During the editing process, I was reading a lot of Alice Notley & thinking of something she said about looking back on her poem “Dear Dark Continent”: “How honestly did I believe those last lines when I wrote them?” A lot of the work no longer felt true to me & the editing process tried to deal with that.

I did travel in the meantime & remembered other cities & imagined myself as other people in other places; the one time London is mentioned—that was not based on my own experience. All the poems were written while I lived in Cambridge.

There’s such a lovely interiority to Chen’s musings, counterpointed by an “I did this, I did that” quality eschewed by infamous New York School poet Frank O’Hara (1926-1966). Optimistic and populated with an array of friends, Chen’s poems are composed of such long lines, long thoughts, they become comparable in certain gestural ways to that of Ottawa poet Monty Reid—a thought-line long enough it might threaten to reach to the horizon. “Rain for four days. The dry dream. My phone glittering like hair,” writes the poem “Monarchy of the North,” “my / friend texts I wish we lived closer together, the shower steaming. // In the old quarters narrow medieval streets. Consent to look away from / the world.”

 

Soham Patel, The Daughter Industry

 

SAI TELLS A GHOST STORY
(while practicing some version of surya namaskar aka sun salutations) 

 

One morning in late 2010 I looked out my apartment window in Pitts-
burgh where I always saw a parking lot, the Spinning Plate Artist Lofts,
and a euonymus-lined part of the avenue, there at the beginning of
Friendship. 

I knew all the families living on the block because of the rescue dog I live
with—we would walk around and routinely meet the people. 

That early morning and only that morning, I thought I saw or I saw out
the window a figure of what seemed to be a like four or five-year-old
brown girl riding a bicycle up Friendship Avenue then fade away. 

How else I know I saw a ghost is the child seemed so composed, happy, and
it was way too early in the morning for someone so young to be out riding
alone.

The latest from Virginia-based British-born poet Soham Patel is The DaughterIndustry (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2026), a title that follows an array of publications including at least four chapbooks, as well as the full-length collections to afar from afar (The Accomplices, 2018) and ever really hear it (Subito Press, 2018), winner of the Subito Prize [see my review of these two here], and all one in the end/water— (Delete Press, 2022) [see my review of such here].

Composed as a lyric narrative through seven characters, The Daughter Industry explores how gender, specifically female and non-binary, is approached and reduced, articulating a choral voice in three acts: with short opener to begin, a prose poem set as a rush, a push of dense lyric. As the piece “IN MY DOTTED SUIT AND NO DUPATTA” begins: “On one of the days I found my gender I was in my white dotted orange Punjabi suit sans dupatta I always went sans dupatta because a dean at the arts college told me I had to wear the dupatta always while working and when I asked him why he said to me with smiling eyes in his third language and my first and only fluent one ‘So you always look like a pretty girl!’ [.]” Writing a kind of sequential accumulation, Patel offers a blend of voice and voices, allowing each their own agency, their own space, across an articulation of (as Rajiv Mohabir offers in their back cover quote) “the continued erasure of girls, women, and the nonbinary actors in this seven-part choreopoem,” weaving in and around each other as little bricks of text, all of which combine to form this larger book-length pattern.

Patel cuts a shape of truth, utilizing blocks of text and visual bends as flourish; setting the stage, as one might see this work performed quite easily in a theatrical setting. “one becomes female for the purposes of reproduction,” begins the poem “CLOWNFISH ALL BORN MALE AND THEN THE DOMINANT,” “yellow-bellied water snake gives birth to litters w/out // any men anyway some cardinals like ppl all bright red // fellas and the pale of lady’s gray moods when pesticide // turns common reed frog males into fully functioning fe- // males human baby born→dr. looks for a penis→she // can’t find one the human baby is killed [.]”

imogen smith, raw & zero

 

earth towers tilling trash, how can we do what we do to air?

What’s flying up there? A balloon? A kite? A drone? Us?

Kite peers down through gloaming, sees a beach, sunlit.

Sentimentality saves no soul, but the sun deserves a break from heartache.

What can we say but it’s just that simple—

webbed ecologies of breath (“hot muck making”)

The latest from Brooklyn-based poet and performer imogen smith, following her full-length debut, stemmy things (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], is raw & zero (Nightboat Books, 2026), an assemblage of confident and gestural lyrics, composed via monologues, performances and declarations, and hands waving into the air. “Tricky little venus,” begins the poem of the same name, “here’s something / you should know / —i am never / the most / liberated girl / in the room. / Sure, / i’ve slept in / all the right / beds, / floated in / streams / dreaming / life open / like a door / unto / valleyful.” Engaged with rich language and propulsive lines, there’s an element of cabaret to these pieces; over-the-top and experimental, playing with form across the canvas of both page and stage. As the poem “attn” begins: “Seated to poem / an act of devotion to the material // world. In silence i am eternal // -ly perturbed. Even the dumb / shit is sacred. Word [.]” These are poems that celebrate the body and heart of the transgender self, of the author’s transgender self, offering all with an equal acknowledgment; a kind of grace, writing the spiritual and the physical, God and assholes, in divine and equal measure.

This seems very much a book of declarations, as I suggested, although just as much a book of devotions, assembling a collage of poems and poem-shapes—from accumulating short lines, prose poems, meditative and long, languid sentences and visual gestures—into something both playfully and seriously grand, and singularly coherent. Or, as part of the lyric sequence “mutual peasure mutual” offers:

Evenings are for sex & soft drugs
a handful of paragraphs written or read
gravitational erotic flotsam between
precarity & nasal swabs        trips
to several pharmacies, markets
bookstore & boo’s, the rave in Queens
last Thursday night—all slick
w lube tongue sweat—so rare
‘s a pleasure, oft guilt in plague times.
Naked in bed, folding my sorrows
listening to Julius Eastman as cars zip
Pacific in pitch. Dream.