OVERPOUR
My first book, Overpour, was published by Action Books in 2016.
From Action Books:
Jane Wong’s first collection makes a brilliant entrance. Animal, vegetable, mineral, mothers, grandmothers, continents, bugs and blood and guts—the poems in Overpour are bodies of vibrant and vibrating matter that constellate across biography, family history, and geography. They see widely and feel deeply and subtly; they tumble out with a wondrous, now-reverent, now-frenetic, ever-keen sense of the sense-memories that carry us.
Kind Words:
“Jane Wong’s powerful first book weaves together seemingly disparate topics such as war and child’s play, language and exile, debt, animals and nature. By doing so, Wong creates a space between—for the reader to enter. At the same time, by creating this space, she makes a space for possibility… Montage-like, the poems are also a kind of philosophy by which I mean they are curious. They ask questions of the world. Not afraid of being earnest, Wong’s voice is both playful and cerebral, weaving in and out of the world—its wars and its violence, poverty and alienation—making a beautiful and smart, strange and new, word elixir.” — Cynthia Cruz
“Jane Wong’s debut collection of poems, Overpour, is a sonic smorgasbord—the poems contained are feral and fierce, their images wild with rapture and tenderness.” — Sally Wen Mao
“The sky was so blue you could hold it/ In your hand and throw it like a bomb,” writes Wong as she opens her beguiling debut collection. In the disorienting world of these poems, objects and ecosystems constantly transform and surprise, and exile, war, and death lurk as animals… Amid the distances recorded—the space between two continents, or between such fraught terms as natural and unnatural—Wong adopts the voice of her mother in order to further gauge lineage and her own place. In a book replete with juxtapositions, Wong asks readers how to judge a better self in comparison to a flawed one.” — Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“The leap between subjects from line to line accentuates Wong’s sharp images. By the speed of their movement, the ghosts in the previous line pushes the reader to keep up, to be willing to go toward the ghosts of multiple nationalities, of multiple species, and of human choices—ghosts gazing and being gazed at across continents.” — Black Warrior Review
“Wong places organic, slight sinister images within a poetic structure that restricts their desire to sprawl and metastasize.” — Poetry Northwest
Read a poem from the collection:
Buy the Book: