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Tuesday, December 31, 2019

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December 31, 2019
 

Pre-credit Sequence for the Film About the Camp

 
Ken Chen
"Pre-credit Sequence for the Film About the Camp" by Ken Chen

About this Poem

 

"In 2011, I helped organize a delegation to the border where Arizona met Mexico. We saw American soldiers carrying automatic weapons at Sasabe and Nogales, drove to the Tent City, and saw a judge try 70 migrants handcuffed together in forty minutes. In Arizona, I was inspired by those we encountered: Coalición de Derechos Humanos, Puente and its Barrio Defense Committees, NDLON, The Florence Project, and the Tohono O'odham nation, which has lived on both sides of the border for thousands of years. Hope fails us, the poet Juan Gelman wrote; grief never does, but you must not be 'deluded by grief' for this reason. You must not abandon hope. This poem comes from a book, tentatively called Death Star, about my travels to find my father in the country of the dead, where I find those who colonialism killed, and to migrate him to the land of the living."
Ken Chen

 

Ken Chen is the author of Juvenilia (Yale University Press, 2010), which was the recipient of the Yale Younger Poets Award. He served as the Executive Director of the Asian American Writers' Workshop from 2008 to 2019, and is currently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.

more-at-poets

Poetry by Chen

 

Juvenilia
(Yale University Press, 2010)

"Father's Memory of a Mexican Mining Camp" by Cindy Williams Gutiérrez

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"When the Orders Came" by Fatimah Asghar

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"Race/Race" by Martha Collins

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December Guest Editor: Paisley Rekdal

 

Thanks to Paisley Rekdal, author of Nightingale (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month's weekdays. Read a Q&A with Rekdal about her curatorial approach this month and find out more about our guest editors for the year.

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"Pre-credit Sequence for the Film About the Camp" by Ken Chen

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