Jenny Liou’s debut poetry collection conjoins the world of cage fighting and the traumas of immigration. In Muscle Memory, Washington-based poet Jenny Liou grapples with violence and identity, beginning with the chain-link enclosure of the prizefighter’s cage and radiating outward into the diasporic sweep of Chinese American history.
Liou writes with spare, stunning lyricism about how cage fighting offered relief from the trauma inflicted by diaspora’s vanishing ghosts; how, in the cage, an elbow splits an eyebrow, or an armbar snaps a limb, and, even when you lose a fight, you’ve won something: pain. Liou places the physical manifestation of violence in her sport alongside the deeper traumas of immigration and her own complicated search for identity, exploring what she inherited from her Chinese immigrant father―who was also obsessed with poetry and martial arts. When she finally steps away from the cage to raise children of her own, Liou begins to question how violence and history pass from one generation to the next, and whether healing is possible without forgetting.
To celebrate the publication of Muscle Memory, author Patrick Coleman will join Liou for a reading & conversation at Beyond Baroque. The reading will be hosted by Kaya Press’s Editor-in-Chief, Neelanjana Banerjee.
Doors Open: 7:00 PM
Readings start: 7:30 PM
About the authors:
Jenny Liou (born 1983) is an English professor at Pierce College and a retired professional cage fighter. She lives and writes in Covington, Washington.
Patrick Coleman makes things from words, sounds, and occasional pictures. His first novel, The Churchgoer, was released by Harper Perennial on July 30, 2019. It is being adapted for television starring Matthew McConaughey for FX. His debut collection of poems, Fire Season, was written after the birth of his first child by speaking aloud into a digital audio recorder on the long commute between the art museum where he worked and his home in a rural neighborhood that burned in the Witch Creek Fire of 2007. It won the 2015 Berkshire Prize and was released by Tupelo Press on December 1, 2018. His short-form prose has appeared in Hobart, ZYZZYVA, Zócalo Public Square, the Writer’s Chronicle, the Black Warrior Review, Juked, and the Utne Reader, among others. He earned an MFA from Indiana University and a BA from the University of California Irvine. He lives in Ramona, California, with his wife and two daughters, and is the Assistant Director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego.
This event is Free & In-Person at Beyond Baroque. Masks are required while inside our center.
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If you can’t join us in-person the event will be live-streamed on Beyond Baroque’s YouTube channel at the scheduled time of the event.
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