With poetry, child of immigrants ponders idea of home
In the beginning of her first book, “House A” (Omnidawn), Jennifer S. Cheng writes: “It is important to note that before language, children experience memories as image and sound, which is to say they experience them as poetry.”
Composed of three sections, each written in a different form, “House A” reconstructs this childlike experience of the world by blending the literal and metaphorical ways in which we build our houses and our selves.
The first section is a series of letters written to Mao, intimate and conjectural, that investigate the overlapping natures of memory and longing, history — both personal and cultural — and rootedness.
By phone, Cheng said, “I think a lot about how — in my particular immigrant household, how does history and how does trauma and how do all these things that I never really heard about explicitly from my parents ... how do those things become part of me?”
In “House A,” she asks: “What if the absence of a point of reference is not something to be lamented but a structural foundation on which to build a house we fill with water?”
In another letter, she writes: Dear Mao, I hope you understand that what I am doing is trying to give you a history of water, which, like memory and sleep, is fluid and wafting in refracted light.
Books Inc. Laurel Village presents a panel on the theme of body, with Jen Richter (“No Acute Distress”), Matthew Siegel (“Blood Work”), Vanessa Hua (“Deceit and Other Possibilities”) and Ingrid Rojas Contreras (7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 20, 3515 California St., S.F., free).
Slovenian Lidija Dimkovska discusses her novel “A Spare Life” (Two Lines Press), which won the 2013 European Union Prize for Literature (7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 20, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Ave., Oakland, free).
SpeCt Books celebrates the publication of an uncollected prose piece by Jack Spicer called “The Wasps,” with readings by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (3 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 22, Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St., S.F., free).