'Her insides are contacting you': Fen Sun Chen's New Book, The 8th House

Lucky us: Feng Sun Chen's latest book, The 8th House (Black Ocean 2015) is reviewed by J. Fossenbell for The Volta Blog. "Feng Sun Chen’s latest collection of poems traces an enclosed space of intimacy that invites you in—not like sex (though there’s sex here, too) but primarily like inhabiting/invading the wet cavities of a massive, contaminated body in a darkly domestic and sincerely spiritual way." In December, Chen herself wrote about the book's origins:

The title of my new book is The 8th House and it came to me only after a long editorial process which involved some emotional processing as well. Though I could probably name every one of my projects “The 8th House,” since my natal chart is basically a giant stellium in the 8th, (and hence most of my energy, creative or otherwise, is channeled through it), I believe that this maggoty project most acutely represents entering the 8th, the house of transformative, grotesque, perverse and mutative intimacy, death and rebirth. The work is a tracing of a very plutonian period of my life, when I frequently and regularly found cards 13 and 16, death and the tower, when I asked the universe to show me a reflection . . .

Fossenbell reads the reflections:

It is stupid to escape the self
The real self wants to be ruptured

The speaker is equal parts human and animal, stupid and divine, full of longing and compassion, grieving the dissolution of the self that can only express itself in failed dualities and broken language(s). Thoughts are de/formed through the language that births them, already dumb translations from another realm into the sphere of the mouth, tongue, breath, utterance. The speaker asks, “Is it because we have two eyes that we can only see two things?”

From the first long poem “[I AM THE MIDAS]”, with its initial six pages SHOUTED as if from a splintered dais in some hyper/surreal amphitheater of cruelty, Chen stumbles into sudden possession of revelations.

I SUDDENLY THOUGHT I HAD GIVEN BIRTH

Nascence, or the need for it, is at the core of many of these poems’ energy—both the unbearable emptiness of “epidemic” infertility, and also the frightening and beloved fetuses that can’t or won’t come, the lost Suns of “mary”. There’s a sense here of the utterly impossible task of either forming or being a perfect body.

I am desperate for a fetus.
To be a soft stomach bloated with sea life
cannibalistic like a virgin.
I will walk on the black shore with my child
still shiny with mucus and blind

The speaker’s drift across registers and spiritual states ranges from the corporeal Peg to the transcendent mary, with many others in between. Peg/Peggy is never fully revealed or explained, but reminds me of the dead pig tree and “I’m OK, I’m Pig!” of Kim Hyesoon, the only person Chen directly names in her acknowledgements. Her references to the little Pegs carry in them a deadly serious joke on the nature of consciousness and communication, and what it means to be a gratuitous human. Pegs/pigs are sentient, except as pork, and in both forms make repeated appearances throughout these poems.

Read it all at The Volta Blog.