Water Chasing Water

by Koon Woon

176pp | 2013 | Paperback | ISBN 9781885030498

Described by Bob Holman as “Li Po in drag, the voice of New America,” Koon Woon exploded onto the poetry scene in the late 1990s. Largely self-taught, and struggling with both mental illness and homelessness, Seattle-based Woon wrote about the back alleys and tenement rooms on the margins of immigrant culture. His first collection, The Truth in Rented Rooms (included in this volume), won a PEN poetry prize and earned praise from Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Garrison Keillor. Water Chasing Water is Woon’s second collection, and continues his exploration of loneliness and memory with poems and essays that seek out “This light / Without which existence is not detectable.”

praise

[B]orn in a small village in 1949 China, [Koon Woon] listens to the edge of America, pours Cantonese nouns into a Stevens/Eliot/Whitman mixmaster and serves up dispatches from a borderland where expulsion is a state of grace.”

— The Village Voice

“Like the Angel Island poems carved on the walls of detention barracks by early Asian immigrants, like inner-city graffiti sprayed or chiseled on walls and buildings, Koon Woon’s poems possess a moral intention that is part of the consciousness of struggling peoples everywhere.”

— Russell Leong, Amerasia Journal

“Koon Woon, like Bob Kaufman, is a writer of solitudes. But like Walt Whitman, his solitudes contain multitudes. Join Koon Woon in his imaginings and enter into his room.”

— Steve Cannon, Director, A Gathering of the Tribes

“In these poems, I hear Koon Woon singing from his ‘crib’—a unique kind of blues that reverberates all the way from little village Canton to the homeless alleys of Seattle… These bent notes float out of his window, twist and ring out into the cold crisp air of a gray winter sky. ‘When the cooks go home in nights like bits/of shrimp in bitter melon soup…’  Drink it down, drink it down. The soup of this poet produces a bitter but satisfying warmth that needs to be experienced.”

— Alan Chong Lau, Author, Blues and Greens

“Luckily it’s the world. Miraculously, Koon Woon is alive in it, reminding us joyful and brilliant, sad as salt, untranslatable — live!.. Miraculously, Koon Woon has written The Truth. You read it!”

— Bob Holman, Author, In With the Out Crowd 

“These poems set a thousand horses galloping in the Asian diaspora in which so many are caught.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“We readers are lucky Koon Woon hid out in the Aberdeen, Washington walk-in freezer of the family restaurant to read Joyce and Kafka. It takes a cross-cultural rebel and sometime outsider like Koon Woon to show us the doors between worlds.”

— Sesshu Foster, Author, City Terrace: Field Manual and Atomic Aztex

“In Koon Woon’s Water Chasing Water, a river appears in one poem and flows into the next, appearing there as rain, turning up in one place as an ocean and in yet another as a damp and soggy sadness.”

— Jai Arun Ravine, Lantern Review

awards

Winner of a 2014 American Book Award.