EXCERPT

JASMINE PUTS MONKEY IN PERSPECTIVE  

You survived on nothing
but verdigris and iron pills
for five hundred years.
You screwed your eyes
shut and leapt through
a waterfall just to find out
what was on the other side.
You erased your name
from the book of the dead
and lived for forty-nine days
in a furnace full of holy fire. 
But, Sun Wukong, I will bet 
you have never kissed
your girlfriend goodbye
on hot, summer asphalt
in front of your grandma
then ridden home
in the family SUV, 
listening to the sound-
track of a Chinese opera,
terrified and in love.

ABOUT THE POET

Jasmine An comes from the Midwest. Her chapbook, Naming the No-Name Woman, won the 2015 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize and her work has been supported by residencies at Hedgebrook and Willapa Bay AiR. Currently, she is an Editor at Agape Editions and pursuing a PhD in English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan.

ABOUT THE COVER ARTIST

Jia Sung is an artist and educator, born in Minnesota, bred in Singapore, now based in Brooklyn, and received a BFA from RISD in 2015. She was a 2018-2019 Smack Mellon Studio Artist and Van Lier Fellow, and is currently an art director at Guernica and Teaching Artist in Residence at the Hudson River Museum. Her paintings and artist books have been exhibited across North America, including the RISD Museum, Wave Hill, EFA Project Space, Lincoln Center, Yale University, and MOMA PS1, and in publications including Hyperallergic, Jacobin Magazine, Asian American Writers Workshop, and The Guardian. She has taught workshops at organizations like the AC Institute, Abrons Arts Center, Children’s Museum of the Arts, and Museum of Chinese in America.    » jia-sung.com

WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING

Monkey Was Here by Jasmine An summons Sun Wukong, the legendary Monkey King, to Earth. Fusing Eastern mythology to the American Midwest, these poems speak to the mythical trickster, prayerlike and defiant, seeking answers from the divine as much as they challenge him. In this book, everything is at stake: the body, the psyche, the world—all of it impossible to comprehend and aching to be discovered. What a magical and moving ride.

—W. Todd Kaneko, author of This Is How the Bone Sings

In Jasmine An’s Monkey Was Here, mythology is both honored and uprooted, creating brilliant poem-maps that re-imagine the heart, the body, the self. An’s poems are tender reflections of a speaker navigating a world of longing and belonging, language and familial inheritance, definition and (un)definition, geography and time. Her poems pay attention to the blurriness of gender, family, face, and often reside deeply in the sticky space, embodying — and re-contextualizing — a beloved Chinese “trickster god” in new light. “If you want to know / me, you must come looking,” the speaker in one poem writes. And indeed, we find ourselves seeking, holding Sunwukong close in a Michigan Chinese Christian church, confronting him on top of summer asphalt, shaving his armpit hair — our own — in a cool shower stall. These are poems that stitch, sear, pluck back up; linguistically and emotionally, An's poems “bristle / and belong.” Formally rich and intellectually generous, Monkey Was Here gifts me with the courage – and radical softness – to reinvent, to look deeper within myself for the tiny god in me. I call Jasmine An one of my luminaries — a poet whose work opens many windows for me and makes innovation possible, a poet whose work I carry into the room wherever I read, write, live. —Carlina Duan, author of I Wore My Blackest Hair

“Sun Wukong, / you were a bad Asian. / You did not sit still.” Unapologetically polyvocal and multilingual, Jasmine An’s Monkey Was Here does more than retell the myth of Monkey King—this chapbook lets Monkey King wreak havoc anew, lets this untamable one explore and interrogate the mythologies governing race, gender, and sexuality in Asian America. I wish this collection existed when I was younger, not as an answer to my questions about identity and belonging, but as a wide-open door to fiercer and more incisive questioning.  —Chen Chen, author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

WORK IN THIS CHAPBOOK FIRST APPEARED IN

Anthropoid Collection, The Blueshift Journal, Elastic Magazine, HEArt Online, Menacing Hedge, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Political Punch (Sundress Publications), Stirring: a Literary Collection, Waxwing Literary Journal.