'Nicholas Wong is a poet and teacher and even a “fire-starter,” according to Time Out: Hong Kong. His poetry collection Crevasse, which Tarfia Faizullah described as “poetry that is unashamed to be relentless” and Ocean Vuong called “a book of seared seeking, a restlessness that opens,” is Kaya’s most recent release. In celebration of this book, Kaya asked him a few questions about language, poetry, and writing. Nicholas Wong has has been a finalist for the New Letters Poetry Award and the Wabash Prize for Poetry, and he received his MFA from City University of Hong Kong.--

'Crevasse, Nicholas Wong’s newest collection of poetry, starts with an epigraph from Maurice Merleau-Ponty that notes the impossibility of observing one’s own physical body and, therefore, the necessity of a “second,” “unobservable” body from which to view one’s own. Crevasse collects poems that seek to uncover the seam connecting these mutually observed and observing bodies. Written in English, Wong’s second language after Cantonese, these meticulously wrought poems achieve a careful de-familiarization of language – its reliance on sound and sense and the painstaking, word-by-word accrual of meaning – to both enact and exemplify the irreducible persistence of the body through illness, dislocated desires, and colonization. Like Samuel Beckett and others before him, Wong has deliberately chosen to write in a non-native language – a decision that frees him to strip down, interrogate, and ultimately reorient the fragmented complexities of the multiple marked communities he inhabits: queer, Asian, Hong Kong native, poet, reader, lover. The results are a stunning array of poems, both lyric and experimental, which seek to lay bare the gap between perfect familiarity and inevitable distance – “The layered self/ on a plate,/ slain by silver-/ware.”---