Bound Together :: Annie Won / Brenda Iijima and Marcy Rae Henry
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THE MANUSCRIPT
“We found ourselves writing about chemistry while also really writing about gender while also really writing about race while also really writing about science’s insistence on formal taxonomies that impact sentience on every level. We went down every rabbit hole that appeared. We rode every unstable elevator up to the roof. We confronted our personal histories, then transmuted them. Along the way we met Lucy, Molly, Diana and Eve, etc. We reacquainted with our mothers, biological and otherwise. We encountered strictures and we broke through them to arrive at booby traps lingually, conceptually and psychically. We traveled through technicalities, beyond camp, beyond hysteria, into a region filled with laboratories brimming with emergent forms of presence and thinking. What we forged is a biotechnical fable of personhood.”
-Annie Won & Brenda Iijima
THE AUTHORS
Annie Won is a poet, yoga teacher, and a former medicinal chemist. Annie is particularly interested in spaces of mind, body, and page. She is a Kundiman Fellow and a Juniper Writing Institute scholarship recipient. Her chapbook with Brenda Iijima, Once Upon a Building Block, was published with Horse Less Press, and her chapbook, so i can sleep, is from Nous-Zot Press. Her work has appeared in Shampoo and RealPoetik, and is forthcoming from EAOGH, TheThePoetry, TENDE RLION, and New Delta Review. Her critical reviews can be seen at American Microreviews and Interviews.
Brenda Iijima is a poet, novelist, playwright, choreographer, and visual artist. She is the author of nine books of poetry. Her current work engages submerged and occluded histories, other-than-human modes of expression, and telluric awareness in all forms. A play, Daily Life in China, is forthcoming from elis press in 2023, and a novel, Presence, is forthcoming from Georgia Review Press in 2024. A novella, A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, written in collaboration with Janice Lee, was recently published by Meekling Press. Iijima is the founding editor-publisher of Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs. She lives in Brooklyn.
Won/Iijima Excerpt
eat your big mac and finish your vodka bottle
is salt at fault?
is mean green?
is tundra salad meltdown?
salatim
(i) don’t want to know what goes up or
what goes down. it doesn’t do me any good
our data set is incomplete
more examining is required
a versatile method of confabulating the entire truth
thanks to your advice (i) will be eating less brick ramen and drinking a bit more
-from “BOARD OF SPIRITUAL ADVISORS”
THE MANUSCRIPT
We Are Primary Colors gathers urgent poems of political activism and solidarity, of travel, of lockdown, of selves present and selves left behind. Formally exuberant and communally engaged, Henry’s writing captures a seeking, restless intelligence that builds meaning by weaving between continents and between languages. Braiding memory with astute perception, these interlingual poems capture the anxieties and the beauties of twenty-first-century global citizenship.
THE AUTHOR
Marcy Rae Henry is una Latina/e de Los Borderlands and a multidisciplinary artist. Her writing has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize nomination and first prize in Suburbia’s 2021 Novel Excerpt Contest. Her work will be included in the Best New Poets of 2023 anthology. Other writing and visual art appear in The Worcester Review, Mud Season Review, PANK, The Southern Review, Thimble Magazine and The Brooklyn Review, among others. M.R. Henry is an associate editor for RHINO and an associate professor of English and creative writing at Wilbur Wright College. For more than twenty years she has curated and co-curated poetic events for the City Colleges of Chicago and Chicagoland communities, including readings and performances for Red Rover Series and 100,000 Poets for Change. Though she is a digital minimalist with no social media accounts, she can be found at marcyraehenry.com and Poets&Writers.
Henry Excerpt
Brown, adjective: ‘a color as of dark wood or rich soil.’
When the summer fell from the sky above Puerto Rico
houses splintered into wood crumbled into dark soil
and dogs on Playa Lucia were carried away by floods.
In India an ark floated away with a flood
carrying not animals but books.
Seven still sit in the Big Dipper.
America ignored dogs splinters floods tears
the people who’ve had citizenship for over a hundred years.
-from “Primary Colors”
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