News

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

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

Sep 2024 — My Bad Poetry (podcast)


Endorsements

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

FOCAL POINT

Reviews

Full Stop Magazine
by Kelly Swope
The Los Angeles Review
by Angelo Mao
Orion Magazine — Camille Dungy’s “Fifteen Poetry Recommendations…”
Rave reviews on LitHub’s Book Marks

Interviews

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

Readings

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