Michael Leong’s ‘Dear Vase’: A Poetic Meditation on Fragility and Collapse

Description

Black Square Editions, paperback

Publication Date: August 25, 2025

Publisher Marketing: 

Dear Vase Already Shattered Against the Fragile Floor is the third volume in a projected pentalogy that draws on literary collage, formal constraint, and rhetorical complication to concentrate, transform, and re-release the contingencies of chaos. The first two volumes Cutting Time with a Knife (2012) and Words on Edge (2018) are also from Black Square Editions. An experiment in what Leong calls a “disorientalist poetics,” Dear Vase is haunted by three disparate figures from East Asian cultural history, two real and one imagined: Tang Dynasty poet Li Po (701-762), landscape painter Jeong Seon (1676-1759), and “Hiroshima poet” Araki Yasusada (1907-1972), a yellowface fabrication. In the face of various Orientalisms—including the lures of “auto-Orientalism,” “meta-Orientalism,” and “re-Orientalism”—Leong’s surrealist poetry wagers upon an ethics and aesthetics of disorientation. MICHAEL LEONG teaches poetry at Kenyon College.

Explore more from our collection.