PEЯFACT (Talonbooks, 2019)
“Part treatise on phenomenology, part theatrical score on ontology, part billet-doux to poetry itself” (Divya Victor), PEЯFACT is a three-part series of poems interrogating the nature of experience, language, trauma, and identity. This moving, philosophical debut, whose influences range from Antonin Artaud and Simone Weil to Gertrude Stein and George Oppen, meditates on materiality and consciousness, empathy and awareness, absence and mutuality – the physical presence of language.
REVIEWS
- Montreal Review of Books, Summer 2019. Reviewed by Klara du Plessis
- rob mclennan's blog, April 2019. Reviewed by rob mclennan.
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"PEЯFACT's title places ego's I (Я in Cyril's alphabet) between breath's impending end (PE) and what we think we know (fact). Consciousness is at risk here, always, for the body is just about to betray it. Fong's poems are unrelenting; they eschew lyric utterly, enacting relations of page and stage. Here, repetition and echo are cognitive glue, igniting language's vortex, so as to enter human sensuality, human life. Read slowly and savour! There are roses!" —Erín Moure, Governor General's Award-winning author of Little Theatres and Planetary Noise
"PEЯFACT is a cerebral, cinematic, engrossing book written across and through language at its fleshiest folds, its most adored and impenetrable surface... I am struck by the work's prosody, its conceptual girth and ambition... Moving language - its facticity, its perfection - this way and that, so as to perforate it, crack it open, seeds and all, Fong suggests with acuity and sharp insight how feeling is the thing that takes and renders shape... and how this is housed in a still-juicy "tenuous flesh." —Divya Victor, author of Kith
"PEЯFACT is a sensate weather system of thought, from a rare and opulent intellect. Consciousness vibrates, dissolves, turquoises, and hydrates the space it moves through. It moves through you. Through walls of breathing fur and theatres of unstagable plays, where STORM, WIND, RIVER and STAGE play themselves, in this most interactive place, the "world imagined and enacted day to day."—Erin Robinsong, author of Rag Cosmology