2012 Swan Scythe Press Chapbook Award Winner
Henry W. Leung
Henry W. Leung was born in a Chinese village, raised in Honolulu and later in Alameda, and went on to earn his BA from Stanford, during which time he studied abroad at Peking, Cambridge, and Oxford Universities. He has taught creative writing in Hong Kong and Prague. He is now finishing his MFA in Fiction at the University of Michigan as a Kundiman Fellow and Soros Fellow.
“Exquisitely structured in elegiac lyric tapestries, Paradise Hunger ferries us into a luminous underworld filled with messages of grief and the promise of renewal. From Hawai’i to Guangdong, Castro Valley to the Gobi Desert, Paradise Hunger maps the intricate geography of mourning, dazzling in its juxtaposition of sorrow and resilience.”
-Stephen Hong Sohn“Abounding with the melodious examples of the lyric narrative poem, Henry W. Leung’s chapbook traverses the experiences of immigration, seasons of loss and grief, and permutations of hunger. From classical mythology to Hawaiian legends, the languages and voices of ‘talk-story’ in Paradise Hunger serve as a locus or guide across displacements of revolution, history, and memory. This is a rich collection to savor, line by line, as Leung muses on questions of home in stanzas eloquently laden with image and allusion: ‘You gave us peaches, our golden apples of Hera, our home myth. Peaches blooming only once each three thousand years.’”
-Karen An-hwei Lee
Hungry Ghosts
In your dreams I say, Don’t shrug off
your burdens. They’re your coat, your wings.
And my wings? Just coins in the pocket,
shuffling like the sound of someone after me.
In this place it’s always summer
though we never see the sun. All the dead
use indefatigable English, though we don’t
understand each other. This teaches us, and you:
Suffer well. We are animals no more.
We dream ourselves in pleasant fictions.
Memories plague and cure the soul like
the taste of garlic on a blade now cleaving
peaches. And I learn to boast, too,
I was, I was, at last.
—Henry W. Leung
