Careen

What is the nature of a desire? How do we come to terms with the systematic conditions of racism, desire, and alienation that underscore our lives? What are the generational lineages behind our daily existences? How do we fall in love against the landscape of white America? Blending philosophy and prose, CAREEN presents a braided sequence of poems that present as études—punctuated reflections. At times sexy, deeply ironic, and melancholic, the poems in CAREEN question our deep hunger for inclusion and call back a long history of displacement. Then, “eventually, every color careens into its own lack,” and the carte blanche of whiteness in America is deftly overturned. Cut from the migration stories of a queer Asian American speaker, CAREEN starts as a cry to belong to someone, and winds up becoming a love note plunging headlong into its objects of unattainable desire.