Warren Liu NEWS
First Contact
Something on the horizon inches towards the drunken villagers of Zonal Beach, but what—or who—could it be? In First Contact, Warren Liu presents a hilarious, polyphonic poem that narrates the agonizingly slow- motion progress of a first contact encounter between coastal natives and ship wrecked would-be colonizers. Liu’s wry, humorous poetry uses three distinct voices to highlight the inherent farce of coming up against a world entirely different from one’s own. Slipping between tropes of colonial myth-making and alien encounters, Liu animates the strange, slanted rhymes of history with a voracious wit and deft ear. Whether narrating the choral jabberings of the bewildered villagers or a mystic’s pop-culture-informed oracular visions or the epistolary reminiscences of a lost exile, Liu demonstrates again and again how colliding with a new culture always happens first as farce, then as farce once more.
praise
“It’s time for you to get high and sozzled on the boozy, mock-eloquent and marvelous music of Warren Liu’s First Contact. Or maybe a better word than ‘marvelous’ is ‘exotic,’ given the way these wacky poems get drunk on the lore by which the West once mythologized the East, a narrative of pagan lands and gargantuan birds that Liu somehow warps through a wormhole into a malfunctioned future. First Contact recalls the kooky, go-for-it-all science fictional “Asian”-ness of Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution and Ed Park’s Same Bed, Different Dreams, but more inebriated and butt-forward. In this book, Liu invites you to hang with his beach bums and socratic speculators, Odd-Chang, Miko, and Hilo as they try to figure out what the hell is going on. Is their chimerical setting some pagan land a la Mandeville and Marco Polo, a dystopian extraterrestrial zone, or maybe just Venice Beach? And what do we make of the unusual fauna glimpsed in the distance, the carnivorous sheep of man? Shimmering, inventive, and linguistically alive, First Contact is a fresh intervention in Asian American studies, gender, resistance, and the incubation of goofiness.” —Ken Chen, Juvenilia
“First Contact by Warren Liu is a dazzling deep-space odyssey into the gnarly crevices of our colonial, androidal, necropastoral, neoliberal, self-reflexive wastelands. It’s important. This epic poem remixes the high, the low, the zoological, and celestial in a breathless, intoxicating series of linguistic confrontations. A mad mix of sci-fi anti-melancholia, this book turns Empire inside out like a cosmic rag doll playing a game of death-drive Chutes and Ladders. Enter this metabolic and prophetic poetry opera to digest and be digested. It’s an awakening that we need at this late moment.” —Sun Yung Shin, The Wet Hex
“Warren Liu has crafted a delirious, head-spinning, possibly intoxicated account of Asia’s first contact with the west. The work tests the limits of sobriety, aka western comprehension of the east, in a dazzling display of couplet pyrototechnics reverse engineered to short circuit the historical accounts of Marco Polo and company. Meet a new cast of characters: alien creatures, a chorus hailing from a cartoon or fairy tale land known as Zonal Beach, Indiana Jones and Data tele-transported from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and a missive-crafting voyager named Truly Odd-Chang. Collectively they revise everything we thought we knew about First Contact, our favorite race of savages and the final frontier!” —Tan Lin, Insomnia and the Aunt
“Playful, misanthropic, peevish, and funny, First Contact is a new kind of travel book, a ballsy Baedeker of speculative dramatic encounters, moral culpability, and encyclopedic talk. This mock-epic is restless and alert to the transactions between archival history and the imagination; but I was most encouraged by its moments of quicksilver tenderness.” —Sandra Lim, The Curious Thing
