Cutting Time With A Knife

Poetry. Asian American Studies. Like a manual pilfered from an alternate history where science and art never diverged, Michael Leong's new book transforms the periodic table of elements into a kind of concrete poetry. Leong's glowing hieroglyphs show that the poetic Word emerges--as irony from iron--from the whirled atoms of the World itself. Indeed, Leong redefines the space-time of the page as a furnace of pure imagination, where the cadaver of modernist poetics is smelted with black humor, 'form[ing] crystals and other alloys at the boundarues of meaning. Here, we discover that 'Poetry is an ongoing reaction, a turning loose of the future.' For time doesn't exist without the possibility of revolution--and Leong has, in CUTTING TIME WITH A KNIFE, created a true 'chamber of possibilities.'--Andrew Joron