Feng Sun Chen peels away the exterior of life’s pink underbelly page by page in her second poetry collection, The 8th House, smelling the meaning in a mother’s stew, carving light from holy grit, dissecting the surging waves of longing and love. These voices occupy the astrological 8th house, a house known for its healers and perversions, ruled by Pluto, where sex, death, and rebirth intersect and consume one another. Continuing to slice away at the distinctions between self and other, animal and human, male and female, the speaker of these poems “exposes by being exposed.” 

Praise

These are poems that will pierce and rupture your mental plane. Its sun will shine light on the blood it draws. Immaculate porcine ghosts and black angels will haunt you.

—The Volta

The eternal and the pigsty get equal attention—bearing witness—bearing witness to heritage—trimming the tree of life, just to knock it down in the next stanza—then beautify it in the trash. 

—The Washington Independent Review of Books