The first full-length English translation of Chinese Peruvian writer Julia Wong Kcomt, A Blind Salmon engages in her characteristic unflinching plumbing of the human body and traces fanged emotions with sticky precision, and also explores mothering, multilinguality, madness. A Blind Salmon, Chinese Peruvian writer Julia Wong Kcomt's sixth collection of poetry, is her first full-length collection in English. Written while she was living in Buenos Aires, the collection crosses borders between Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chepén, Tijuana, and Vienna; ranges over mothering, multilinguality, madness; takes up sameness and differences; and is shot through with desert sand. In these poems, Wong Kcomt engages in her characteristic unflinching plumbing of the human body and traces fanged emotions with sticky precision. She renders homage to the Peruvian poet Jorge Eduardo Eielson, who died in Milan as she was writing these poems. She fingers the filmy line between poetry and narrative prose. She builds a lyrical menagerie.

Contents:           

Armenian Rose -- Song of the Multiform Bird -- Potrero de Santa Rosa -- Manners -- Gabriella Sleeps -- There Were Things in Buenos Aires -- The Desert Dispels -- On Sameness -- Aunt Emma Doesn't Want to Die -- Tijuana Big Margarita -- Dark Jasmines. Jazmines Negros -- Lagoon on Calle Rodríguez Peña -- The Blind Salmon -- Natural Blood -- Cajamarca -- A Feather Falls -- I Ought to Go Live in Colombia -- The Cultural Code of the Sand -- Manicure -- Poem on Distance -- Rhapsody of the Tiger -- Why Do Your Differences -- My Guardian Angel -- Opium Weddings -- The War -- Madness on the Highest Building -- Chernobyl Kid -- I Want to Kill My Sister -- Poem for Georg Trakl -- Mother and Daughter -- By The River -- Woman Eaten By Cats -- Translator's Afterword by Jennifer Shyue -- Translator's Acknowledgments -- Biographical Information.