Christine Shan Shan Hou is a poet and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the author of I'm Sunlight(The Song Cave 2016), Accumulations (Publication Studio), and C O N C R E T E S O U N D (2011), a collaborative artists’ book with artist Audra Wolowiec.

Praise

Christine Shan Shan Hou is earth. An empathic, planetary being, yes, but also, as her poems remind us, an elemental and evolving substance, in which (whom) organisms are, as her poems remind her: growing, ceaselessly; nurturing (being nurtured); coming into color, in deference to and defying tongues; releasing spores, growing mold (incl. limbs); 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th ways of seeing; modes of intelligence that might, when they ultimately detach and self-determine, destroy the world, and all incipient translations of it; poems are BEING HOPEFUL, rising like bubbles, refracting, bursting, dying, spreading, drying out. Because I mean also a celestial body, codependent with the sun, in a state of constant transformation, is that an oxymoron?

Constant. Transformation. Perennial. Passing. Through the stages of life as through the stages of a fruit, a vegetable, an echinoderm, a stench and/or aroma, a collage (poem, for example) beginning with an empty landscape meditating, to which are added shapes, shards from each stage of ancestorhood, migration, loneliness, of grief. One of the most beautiful seasons is Community Garden for Lonely Girls… I have visited many times. I go and leave and go and write or draw something (the leaves) or take a nap or leave something, but do not leave, the garden changes. It is not an altar ("I have never built a shrine") but maybe an … altercation: everything trembling (like "before a feeding frenzy") on the border of total accountability, which focuses the garden, like a planetarium of mirrors, on the next person who, with whatever anxiety or hunger, enters; they are lucky, even if or because everything, the way it is right now, is temporary.

—Brandon Shimoda

Spring-loaded psychic energy and heightened physical intensity catapult Christine Shan Shan Hou’s Community Garden for Lonely Girls into a divergent zone of surreal non-fictive super abundance. Reality is negotiated by imaginative drive as it is by the necessities of corporeality—forms of perception toggle precipitously. A keen attention of macro and micro focus generate poems that surge, rollick, bear down, fly into oblivion, and/or pin down fate with stealth maneuvers. Lingually sophisticated, emotionally generous, and somatically sensitive, this book is a brilliant realization and an epic breakthrough of terms when it comes to living life on planet Earth at this fraught moment in time—how to reckon the historical past and shattering futurity with a flexed lyric of major portent.

—Brenda Iijima

Praise for Community Garden for Lonely Girls

Christine Shan Shan Hou’s Community Garden for Lonely Girls invites readers of all gender persuasions to momentarily suspend the Enlightenment imperative to cultivate their individual plots and embrace the feeling of being disposable—and disposed—into a mass flowerpot. The community is summoned to revel in the confusion, messiness, tackiness, and pleasures of bodies, fluids, border-fucking, and abjection—the experiential fruits of Hou’s formidable poetic assemblage.

—Poetry Project

Christine Hou’s new poetry collection published by Gramma, Community Garden for Lonely Girls, is an irreverent, vibrantly written “feminist spiritual quest.” Hou offers an intimate and intense look at being a lonely girl.

—Asian American Writers' Workshop