Tung-Hui Hu and Rae Gouirand
Monday, Dec. 9 at 7:30 PM
Host: Emmanuel Sigauke
1719 25th Street
Tung-Hui Hu is the author of three collections of poetry: The Book of Motion (University of Georgia, 2003); Mine (Ausable/Copper Canyon, 2007), and Greenhouses, Lighthouses (Copper Canyon, 2013). His poems have appeared in places such as The New Republic, Ploughshares, Gastronomica, Martha Stewart Living Radio, and, most recently, the 2013 SoundWalk festival of sound art in Long Beach, California. Formerly a computer scientist and political consultant, Hu now teaches creative writing and film studies at the University of Michigan, where he is an assistant professor of English.
Waiting for Tear Gas
In our dreams the picket lines
were picket fences. In our dreams
you could run your fingers
between the two halves
of the city. Close enough
to taste the mustard greens
cooking in the neighbor’s kitchen,
your mouth filling with tears.
You could even follow the line as it curved
like parentheses through the streets
and see everything it held back
the way a dam holds the lake behind it,
or a calendar year keeps at bay
the years piling up before it.
— Tung-Hui Hu
originally published in Boston Review 37:4 (July-August 2012)
Rae Gouirand’s first collection of poetry, Open Winter, was selected by Elaine Equi for the 2011 Bellday Prize, won a 2012 Independent Publisher Book Award and the 2012 Eric Hoffer Book Award, and was a finalist for the Montaigne Medal, the Audre Lorde Award, and the California Book Award for poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared most recently in American Poetry Review, VOLT, The Brooklyner, New South, PANK, Gertrude, Handsome, and The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. An adjunct lecturer in the Department of English at UC-Davis, she teaches a number of longrunning workshops in poetry and prose online and throughout California’s Central Valley.
Glass is Glass Water is Water
Glass is glass water is water:
everything is: an experiment
a part of me made clear by
clear things leaping apart.
Water is a return to returning,
always seeking the place
it seeks. We’ve watched:
ourselves become glass then
pieces; we’ve seen held things
go flying. The sound: makes
a sound, comes back from
the walls, enters us: again
I need to say a great number
of things: but the world will say
them for me: most things are
water mostly, glass as clear.
originally published in American Poetry Review, 2013
