A Blind Salmon engages in Julia Wong Kcomt's characteristically unflinching plumbing of the human body and traces fanged emotions with sticky precision, exploring mothering, multilinguality, and madness.

Tusan writer Julia Wong Kcomt's sixth collection of poetry, A Blind Salmon is her first full-length collection available in English. Written while she was living in Buenos Aires, the collection crosses borders between Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chepen, Tijuana, and Vienna. It takes up sameness and difference, shot through with desert sand.

In these poems, Wong Kcomt renders homage to writers such as the Peruvian poet and visual artist Jorge Eduardo Eielson, who died in Milan as she was writing them. She fingers the filmy line between poetry and narrative prose to build a lyrical menagerie all her own.

About the Author

Born into a tusan (Chinese Peruvian) family in Chepen, Peru, Julia Wong Kcomt (1965-2024) was the author of eighteen volumes of poetry, seven books of fiction, and three collections of hybrid prose. In English, her work has been published in The Margins, McSweeney's, Poetry, and other outlets. She lived between Lima and Lisbon.

Jennifer Shyue is a translator from Spanish. Her translations include Julia Wong Kcomt's chapbook Vice-royal-ties and Augusto Higa Oshiro's novel The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu.

Reviews

Praise for A Blind Salmon

"Kcomt's myths are set in the contemporary world, which makes them particularly terrifying in their exploration of subjects like madness, immigration, and motherhood." -Poetry Foundation

"The poems in A Blind Salmon seem to become increasingly charged with life and energy each time they are revisited. Kcomt's speakers are bold and unapologetic, reaching out with language that is sensual, unexpected, unsettling. Her images are often startlingly corporeal, yet always touching the tender complexities of being in the world, a world that does not always [know] how to understand you, or you it, but one that is fully alive." -roughghosts

Praise for Vice-royal-ties

"Julia Wong Kcomt's poems sweep you into the tender points of the diasporic soul-that ache of always being a little bit elsewhere, the yearning for homes and languages that might have been . . . Jennifer Shyue's translation undulates with a delicate, playful attunement." -Katrina Dodson, translator of Macunaima

"Now I want to read everything Wong Kcomt has written (is writing) and everything Shyue is bringing, so ingeniously, into English." -Brandon Shimoda, author of Hydra Medusa

"[Wong Kcomt] slings imagery like a backhand slap. The result is often a whiplash between yearning and carnage." -Justin Sun, Action Books Blog

Book Information
ISBN 9781646053063
Author Julia Wong Kcomt
Format Paperback
Page Count 148
Imprint Deep Vellum Publishing
Publisher Deep Vellum Publishing