Cadence Chung



Chinese melody

Teenagers across the street are dissecting the rain-sodden piano. The rain comes down hard, here, harder than anything you’ve seen, any judgement or judgement day or gavel. I’m sure someone in the world is playing the flute. Your eyes in …

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Review short: Cadence Chung’s Mad Diva

My mother once said, “You have too many desires. If you had fewer desires, you’d be happier.” I wish that I then had Cadence Chung’s retort: “easy to blame desire easy to blame it on the want the wanton of a woman” (15). Breathlessly dispensing with punctuation, these words appear in a poem titled ‘Desio’, early in Chung’s sophomore collection, Mad Diva.

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Black Opium

Coleridge wrote his best poems in a poppyseed haze. I’m not sure about those tiles, he said from my bathtub, looking up at the ceiling. I had no idea what he was thinking: my only experience with opium was the …

Posted in 114: NO THEME 13 | Tagged

What Blooms Beneath a Blood-Red Sky: A Year in Aotearoa Poetry

Poetry is booming in Aotearoa, and nobody can quite say why. What’s stirring our blood in the plague years / this sixth mass extinction / our deteriorating climate of political and literal atmospheres?

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