News

Aug 2025 — Only Poems Poet of the Year Prize Finalist (5 poems + interview)

Nov 2024 — Bay Poets: “The Shape of Salt” (reading)


Across the range of these poems (I felt I was traveling them like a range of mountains) I find beauty, sadness, ferocity, different geographies and formal structures, and also something intangible, that bit of music in the air. But imagine Stravinsky being played by a street performer, or the ashes left after a devastating fire, or the ruins of a relationship between friends, lovers, or parent and child. Something in these poems knows how to identify loss, map it, make of the unspeakable mysteries of our lives, something real and understandable. I can’t think of a more valuable quality for poetry to have.

Kazim Ali, 2023 Subnivean Awards Final Judge, on Qi’s winning poems

Press for FOCAL POINT

Find additional information about Focal Point here.

Reviews

Rave reviews on
LitHub’s Book Marks
Poetry Foundation
by Ryo Yamaguchi
The Los Angeles Review
by Angelo Mao
Full Stop Magazine
by Kelly Swope
Compulsive Reader
by Jeff Kingman
Orion Magazine
by Camille Dungy

Interviews

Smoke Signals to the Dead
by Tria Wen
The Adroit Journal
by Preeti Vangani
Additional interviews

Readings

Keep up with upcoming events or check out past events here.

Booksmith: Focal Point launch
Union of Concerned Scientists: The Poetry of Science
Rattlecast
Additional recorded readings