Hello friends, what a whirlwind last few months this has been! Thank you to everyone who has helped me welcome my first book Focal Point into the world. I am so very grateful for the opportunity to meet, read, talk poetry with, and be read by so many amazing writers.
November/December features & interviews
- Entropy included “Postcards from the Living,” which appeared in The Atlantic, in their Best Poems of 2020-2021.
- Focal Point was highlighted in Orion Magazine‘s recommendations of books about grief and mourning, Lantern Review‘s Asian American Poetry Companion, and Raegan Pietrucha’s roundup of Twitter-loved poetry books.
- For The Rumpus, I spoke with Tria Wen about grief, smoke signals, irrational hope, and much more.
- For Singapore Unbound, I spoke with Janelle Tan, who wrote, “Qi is a poet of ravenous curiosity and clear logic, up against the bewildering mysteries of death. These are poems of a wide-ranging intellectual wandering.”
- Check out other interviews in Litseen‘s The Write Stuff and the podcast Poetry Spoken Here, and look out for an interview with Preeti Vangani in Adroit.
- Diode included “First Spring, 2011” in their latest issue.
- The Racket nominated “This is an Instagram poem” for a Pushcart Prize.
Reviews
- Kiyoko Reidy in Nashville Review called Focal Point “A haunting constellation of loss, dreams, violence, landscape, and spoken language springs from the mind of a scientist willing to question the things that resist answers: death, the capriciousness of power, the uncertainty of knowledge.”
- Angelo Mao, the only other biomedical scientist/poet I know of, reviewed Focal Point for Los Angeles Review, and I really appreciated the unique lens through which he read the book. I don’t know if anyone else could have written this: “For…many first-generation immigrants from Asia, scientific aptitude paved the way for entry into United States and provided the most tractable blueprint for success. However, in parallel with the inability of the speaker’s scientific training to alter the outcome of her mother’s illness, science could (and can) provide these immigrants with scant protection from hostile prejudice and alienation.” Mao’s award-winning debut collection Abattoir was released Nov 2, and I’m excited to read it.
- Other wonderfully kind reviews appear in periodicities, Tab Journal, and Compulsive Reader.
2021 in publications
This feels sort of incongruous here, but if I don’t do this now, I just won’t do it, so here’s my list of publications in 2021:
- An essay, “How to Write an Obituary For Your Mother” in Literary Hub
- “Postcards from the Living” in The Atlantic
- “What Grows in the Desert” in SWWIM
- “First Spring, 2011” in Diode
- “This is an instagram poem” in The Racket
- “About Face” in MiGoZine
2021-2022 events
ICYMI, here are some recently uploaded videos of past events, including my launch event at The Booksmith with Francesca Bell and Mariya Zilberman and “How Words Can Heal,” a reading and panel hosted by Bellevue Literary Review.
Here’s a preview of events coming up next year, including virtual readings with Antonio Lopez at Brookline Booksmith on January 19 and with Susan Nguyen and Annelyse Gelman at BookWoman on February 3. More to come on that front, and in-person events subject to change based on the evolving pandemic.
Other exciting news for 2022: I was awarded a SWWIM residency, so I’ll be in Miami at some point, TBA!
Okay, that’s all. I’ll be taking a much-needed break from the internet until January 10th. Until then, happy holidays and stay safe, everyone.
Jenny Qi, Ph.D. 