Cathy Park Hong on Shattering the Single Story

photo via ssense

“Poetry has so much nuance, but I think there’s something about the pressure of the line break that really heightens whatever you’re trying to say into something operatic. I didn’t want to speak in a way that was operatic, I wanted to have a conversation. I wanted to talk instead of sing.”

Cathy Park Hong is the author of, Minor Feelings, published in Spring 2020 by One World/Random House. She is also the author of poetry collections Engine Empire, published in 2012 by W.W. Norton, Dance Dance Revolution, and Translating Mo'um.  Hong is the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, A Public Space, Paris Review,  McSweeney's, Baffler, Yale Review, The Nation, and other journals. She is the poetry editor of the New Republic and is a professor at Rutgers-Newark University.