About

From an introduction by Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet, curator of the Why There Are Words reading series in Portland, Oregon:

Sam Roxas-Chua 姚 is the author of Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater, Echolalia in Script, and Fawn Language. His poems, artworks, and asemic writings have appeared in journals including Narrative, December Magazine, Cream City Review and an essay/review of his two recent books appears in the Georgia Review and Rhino Poetry. His poetry sequence Diary of Collected Summers was awarded the Missouri Review’s Miller Audio Prize and most recently he was interviewed by Gulf Coast Journal.

Poet Tyehimba Jess describes Sam’s poems as “surreal yet rooted in palpable color and history … it transcends oceans, blends geographies, and bleeds a multitongued heritage for us to better find ourselves.” The thing that strikes me most about Sam’s work is his experience as a traveler between worlds, languages, and artistic mediums; he is a quadrilingual speaker with a multinational background, an adoptee, and a maker open to what happens in the ineffable interstices, the between. He was first drawn to the calligraphic practice called asemic writing as a way to enter a poem through that liminal space between what can’t be said and how the poem says it. Here’s how he described it in an interview:

“In between stanzas of a poem, or when I can’t quite get to an image
or a phrase, I pull out a piece of paper and start writing this nonsensical script. When I do this script and feel the texture of my wrist on the page, it brings me to that image that I want from time to time.”

Eventually, this work became an art form on its own for Sam, one that exists in conversation with his poetry. His books talk to each other across mediums as well, with the poems in Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater resurfacing in the poem that concludes Echolalia in Script, which is made up of phrases drawn from the poems in that book, making a new thing. And each piece of the strange and gorgeous visual art in Echolalia is, in turn, in conversation with a line from that work.

I want to end this introduction with a few lines from Sam’s poem “Salt,” which I read as, among other things, an ars poetica describing his work as a whole:

“And Hum will gather them / in his arms, wave after wave. / Nearing shore, he will give / them lungs, give them names— / pull their voices out of words / made from air.”

Sam lives in Eugene, Oregon

A book launch introduction (1.19.2018)  by my good friend, Mike Copperman, author of Teacher, Teacher Two Years in the Mississippi Delta.

Sam Roxas-Chua 姚 (Yao) is a poet and visual artist who blesses our town with his exceptional literary citizenship: he is the owner of The Poetry Loft, now known as The Requatorist, a small business dedicated to writing workshops, and to fostering community. I have had the good fortune of being able to support his extraordinary efforts to be sure our community is united in solidarity against the nationalism, xenophobia, racism and supremacy that has beset us, as he came up with the idea of the event series “Breaking the Silence: Against a Culture of Fear,” and partnered with the Oregon Writers Collective to be sure that voices are heard even in this persistent darkness. Sam is not one of those writers who runs his own series or group and fails to respect the work and labor of others-he shows up to events, readings, debuts, workshops, and though he is now an artist of national significance, he remains humble, approachable, and genuine, not puffing himself up or holding himself above. He is anchored in the world, stands down here with all of us, and his poems and art are of us, are, as he puts it in his own words, our shared language, “the pulse on our wrists…touching the same inner human wiring, the same orchestra of stars and dust.”

This is not to say that Sam does not write from his own heritage and history of love, loss, and hauntings. He writes poetry because, as he says, “…it is the only language I can truly call my own. I was fortunate to grow up speaking four languages: Tagolog, Hokkien, Mandarin, and English…I was never fully immersed in any single one…born to Filipino parents, adopted into a Chinese family, and then later immigrating to America resulted in…displacements that prevented me from taking claim to country or language. Poetry allows me freedom to stitch these languages together into something that I call my own.”

That poetry has fast found audiences and acclaim. His first book, Fawn Language, was published by Tebot Bach only five year ago. His poems and visual art folios have appeared in magazines like Narrative, december Magazine, Cream City Review, and basalt Magazine; his collection of poems, Diary of Collected Summers, won the first place award in the 7th Annual Missouri Review Audio Competition in poetry and appeared in a live broadcast of Dear Sugar Radio at the Aladdin Theater. Tyehimba Jess, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, says Sam’s poems are “surreal yet rooted in palpable color and history…{his} vision transcends oceans, blends geographies and bleeds a multi-tongued heritage for us to better find ourselves.” Joseph Stroud says he pushes “the boundaries of language…shimmering with almost mythic or visionary quality…encountering luminous questions.” The great Marvin Bell call him an “exciting and original poet of profound imagination,” and Dorianne Laux compares him to Jack Gilbert, asserting that he “reaches beyond the imagery and emotions we expect-creating his own universe, logic, and definitions of the beautiful.” And this praise-enough to make God blush-is mere before the extraordinary chorus of acclaim for Echolalia in Script.

Sam dedicated Echolalia in Script to “Those abandoned at birth.” Perhaps that explains the simultaneous fracture and gravity of these images of ink to paper, parchment, and scroll, the fluid, open, ceaselessly connected script tracing ink into void, juxtaposed or becoming image, or musical note, or swan, or egg, or butterfly, or moon. They are an act of affirmation and persistence, as if the line could indeed lead us forward out of the shattered past without faltering. Leading an adult-adoptee writing group, Sam once explained why he does not write ONLY poems, saying: “Asemic Writing allows me to communicate with my dead. It allows me to commune with the sacred, whatever that means for you. Asemic allows me to be vulnerable to the mysteries of self.”

Echolalia in Script is attracting national attention; I know Sam gave an interview to a prestigious magazine just recently. Author and artist Sandra Alcosser calls his work “sublime.” Michael Wiegers, Executive Editor of Copper Canyon Press, says Sam’s asemic writing is “a poetry that precedes language, a personally rhythmic grammar that is…refreshingly, breathtakingly transcendent.” Rome Literature Award winner David St. John describes the work as “gestural inscriptions…{that} move elegantly over the page as delicately as lyrical strands of light snaking and doubling across the surfaces of a wind-lit mountain lake,” and Portland State Humanities Professor Lawrence Wheeler says it “enthralls with its range of textures, its sharp boldness, or its subtle lyricism,” and author Valerie Laken calls the work an “elegant dance…{that} intensifies and transcends the capacity of marks on the page to make meaning.”

I want to talk for a moment about the relationship between these two books, both of which you can acquire tonight if you are fortunate enough to get one before stock runs out. The title of Echolalia in Script is also the title of a poem printed at the end of the book as a sort of free-form funnel of script, and if you read it through, it has its own logic and motion, its own gravity and wholeness. Reading through the book, the lines proceed one at time with accompanying asemic images that echo, deepen, and complicate, narrativize and subvert the lines themselves. When you read Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater, you find that the lines come from nearly every poem in the book, fragment by fragment, now figured by ink and imagination, reified into a single whole. This is, after all, the double meaning of Echolalia, which is on the one hand the “meaningless repetition of another person’s spoken words as a symptom of psychiatric disorder,” that is, the fractured chaos of language untethered from sense, and on the other hand, the “repetition of speech by a child LEARNING to talk,” which is to say, the ways that a child learns the language they require to become heard and understood.

Sam has taken his heritage and past, of mute abandonment, harm, displacement and chaos, and made of it a music, in Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater; and then in Echolalia in Script, he has reminded us that all meanings are partial, as he torn apart his own verse, made a visual universe of every line, and bound the whole back together again. Surely this is how we all must make and remake ourselves, from our partial identities and revelations, our losses and our temporary victories-to ceaselessly seek wholeness. Wholeness is perhaps impossible in this world that cracks and cracks-except perhaps in the work of an artist like Sam, when long labor and skill and inspiration yield a miracle.

So, tonight, a double miracle: Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater and Echolalia in Script. I give you Sam Roxas-Chua.

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