String Theory / Mongrel Empire Press, 2015
|
Oklahoma Book Award Finalist
|
In her first full-length collection of poems, Jenny Yang Cropp writes about growing up mixed-race, overcoming abandonment and addiction, and surviving the enormity of grief. Moving from supernovas to microscopic black holes, these poems reimagine love, family, and physics as the speaker tries to navigate a world of damaged, often severed, human connections and come to terms with her own fragmented sense of identity. At its heart, String Theory is a meditation on multiplicity and the soul’s capacity to hold countless versions of itself.
Praise for String Theory Jenny Yang Cropp’s debut volume of poetry, String Theory, is a devastating meditation on mixed-race identity. This volume navigates the fraught distances between maternal Korean ancestry and hardscrabble Oklahoma roots, cataloguing a litany of childhood abandonment, addiction, sexual trauma, and young motherhood. These powerful poems, with their deft music and keen intellect, are both emotionally cataclysmic and recuperative, and reveal Jenny Yang Cropp’s gorgeous poetic voice as stunningly unforgettable. -- Lee Ann Roripaugh, Author of Dandarians String Theory is a book of searching. “Looking for the m attached to other,” these poems strive to conjure up what has been lost: a mother, a sister, past histories that might take on “mass and weight instead of bells and wings.” But there is no nostalgia in these elegies. Even at their most harrowing, these are poems of open-eyed witness, echoing a mother who, making kimchi, knows “to stuff the jar / quietly, and not to flinch.” The reward for these excavations, uncompromising in their vulnerability, is the discovery of the vibrations that resonate between past and present, as “my mother’s missing breast / hums back into existence as my own,” revealing that “the universe / is again a moving, breathing thing.” What comes through above all is Jenny Yang Cropp’s clear, strong voice, as it “leans in / to tell me the thing she’s not supposed to talk about.” -- Timothy Yu, Author of 100 Chinese Silences |
Hanging the Moon / RockSaw Press, 2010 (Limited Edition Chapbook)
Sold Out
|
Praise for Hanging the Moon:
Jenny Yang Cropp reminds us, in exact and lyrical language, that we are matter, "that there are no new particles," that "we fall by force, attraction, gravity." Her poems explore grief, forgiveness, separation, acceptance, and the fierce dynamics of relationships. They illuminate what matters most. -- Candace Black, Author of The Volunteer and Casa Marina |
