Wider than the Sky

Reading Wider than the Sky is to encounter a world and a sensibility. With each poem firing as precisely as a synapse, interwoven into one shimmering neural net, Nancy Chen Long’s collection is a richly varied, acutely embodied exploration of how “our life is what our thoughts make it.” Eidetic moments, as vivid as the “star-nosed mole, / its many-fingered nose –a fan of proboscises” ground these poems where a child, finding a perfume bottle that once belonged to her grandmother, is “Suddenly…eating fruit in my memory, faint yellow slivers of stars, / juice running through my fingers.” The universality and specificity of human experience is profoundly felt in these metaphysical poems, interrogating and celebrating how being persists, “forever/home, forever foreign,” despite subjective and collective erasure –its aberrations, its genetic inheritances, its “scorched language,”— “creating/ourselves as we go.”

-Rebecca Seiferle, author of Wild Tongue and Bitters

Empathic polymath Nancy Chen Long considers wide-ranging topics—from neurology to Emily Dickinson, from the big bang to Bible stories—as she interrogates the role of memory in the formation of our narratives and of our selves. Long portrays fleeting scenes from childhood onward—scenes which momentarily shine a flickering light on life’s big topics: the links between story and belief, forgiveness and biology, society and violence, language and loss. The reader experiences this unforgettable book in the same way a memory is experienced—as incomplete images infused with emotional wholeness, images that swell and recede and leave us changed for having been momentarily immersed in the intimacy between past and present that we call memory.
—Jessica Goodfellow, author of Whiteout and Mendeleev’s Mandala

Light into Bodies

The poems in Light into Bodies amaze me with their verbal precision and richness. Revealing a tonal range that bridges scientific specificity and dream-like spontaneity, Nancy Chen Long makes good on her ambition to explore necessary questions about family, race, history, and spirituality. She answers not with pat conclusions, but an illuminating openness, a quickened vulnerability from which her poems derive their lasting strength. Her emotional power and formal mastery are cause for gratitude.

—Peter Campion

These are my favorite kind of poems: stories swept clean with the parsimonious bristle-switch of language even as pockets of narrative remain fluid, aviary, free. The achievement of Light into Bodies is both its momentum and its still moments, “grains of rice, marking a trail back home,” a pacing black puma, sassafras and nettles, a constellation of scars, poem after poem a perfect hymn for those of us “who sing with rage in our throats.”

—Susanna Childress

Readers will indeed feel they have entered through the “good luck door,” after opening Nancy Chen Long’s Light into Bodies. This is a gorgeous debut, filled with glorious language that tenaciously explores the mysteries of many worlds that in the end make one life.

—Kathleen Driskell

“I recreated a world/—so real looking—/out of spit and dust,” writes Nancy Chen Long in her powerful debut, Light into Bodies. And she does just that, while bringing light into the human and animal bodies of the universe, as she chronicles the rhythms of her Taiwanese origins and a childhood journey from Okinawa to the United States and into a generative, complex womanhood. Both the fullness and absence of family guide the speaker of these poems into an illumination of voice, all the more courageous in that it inhabits the knife-edge of liminal space. Nancy Chen Long’s poems sing with rage and rage with tenderness, as they lovingly—and deftly—seek the solace of identity.

—George Kalamaras

Nancy Chen Long’s poems are lush, meditative, and quietly urgent. With lines that are lyrically charged and haunted by the past, these poems long to be heard and carried in the ear. Here are poems that are not afraid of beauty, or silence, or to know, “Dust is never an option. I have no need to hide.”

—Ada Limón

Much is at stake in Nancy Chen Long’s beautiful book. She attempts the impossible—to construct identity in a country where children are told “to color-/in Caucasoid.” Her poems possess an emotional potency translated through the “lexicon of water” and the “vernacular of tumbleweed.” Light into Bodies reminds us of the startling paradox—there is no hope without insatiable hunger. We end where we begin.

—Nancy K. Pearson

Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone

“Nancy Chen Long creates a tantalizing poem collage in Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone. When Chen Long mixes her 21st-century perceptions and depth of compassion with the vocabulary from a Pulitzer Prize-winning twentieth-century war novel, Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens, an imaginary longitude line appears. Across this line connections and sympathies meet, while disconnections and antipathies spar. From her remix the poet makes a seriously playful, playfully serious collage.”

—Molly Peacock