Idiolexicon

I feel completely inadequate to write an actual review review of Shanxing Wang's Mad Science in Imperial City, so I'm hoping I won't need to do so in order to convince you to buy it and read it. It's been getting a lot of attention, so you shouldn't have trouble finding smart writing about it elsewhere.

Over half of the book is one long poem entitled A's Degeneracy, whose section titles are all permutations of the words "how," "to," and "write," which point to one of the central questions of the book.

From the first page of A:

I say, unbearable anxiety about my 1st reading since I was thrown out of the Poetry House.

Yes, I say. His obscure remarks on that little yellow note stuck on my 1st poem. You can use the word W... in your... Poetry is not for you, A. I was told that he was referring to relying on concrete images and metaphors and resisting abstraction in poetry. But I had many grudges against this blasphemous affair between the Deity of Poetry and earthly images and metaphors.

And indeed, there is a great deal of abstraction in this writing. Mathematical theorems, formulae, graphs, diagrams, all pointing toward an unending struggle to frame an identity through language. It's also a hoot.

An excerpt courtesy of The Brooklyn Rail.