recombinant

Can a poetry seek to examine the erasure and reconstruction of a community history? Ching-In Chen's RECOMBINANT is a work of material critique, philosophically jarring in its use of syntax, sound, the erasures held in the stillness of its white-space that again and again mimic a historical registry. Drafting and growing multiple discourses, this text urges the reader to investigate female and genderqueer lineages in the context of labor smuggling and trafficking. Its syntactical utterances create a music that is masterful in these poems' fractured words and experimental representation of page and praxis. Voices from various communities interact with each other to create what Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan calls an assertion of diasporan realities where multi-directional, heterogeneous modes of representation challenge conventional representation via photographs; newspaper articles; maps; city directories; records of immigration, birth and death; as well as scholarly research and archaeological records. RECOMBINANT is a work of insistence, a refusal of erasure, a proof of shared memory through the rewriting and remixing of historical remnant.