Jennifer S. Cheng

Jennifer S. Cheng’s book MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems was selected by Bhanu Kapil as winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize and will be published in 2018. She is also the author of HOUSE A, selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize, and Invocation: An Essay (New Michigan Press), an image-text chapbook. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Hong Kong and has writing in Tin House, DIAGRAM, Entropy, Guernica and elsewhere. Having grown up in Texas and Hong Kong, she lives in San Francisco. www.jenniferscheng.com

December Poetry: Two Poems by Jennifer S. Cheng

"From the Voice of the Lady in the Moon"

These two lyrical, meditative persona poems by Jennifer S. Cheng inhabit “the Voice of the Lady in the Moon,” as the series suggests, and adopt her personage as a vehicle to explore the complications of womanhood. Within the neat boundaries of this fictionalized voice — depicted even by the physical limitations of the poems’ structured stanzas — Cheng unleashes emotionally resonant, bitterly honest monologues about everything from self-harm to self-care, from the desire for domestic stability to the lust for danger.​

— Eugenia Leigh, Poetry Editor