Shu-Ling Chua



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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the writing life

After Grace Yee post-VPLAs we pile into ShanDong MaMa. order dumplings by the dozen. gossip. avoid ‘what we’re working on’. i almost walk into a pole while texting. J calls, ‘TAXIIIII…’ i yell at him for not protecting me from …

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Everything I Don’t Know How to Say / sve što ne znam kako da kažem

When I left Bosnia in 2018, my cousin gave me a book of poetry, Bosansko-Hercegovačka Poezija. It’s a slim volume, bright purple with a pale lilac square on its cover.

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