Slow Burn

Winner of the 2024 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize

Persistent yet flickering, Slow Burn unveils a passionate world where love is both impossible and inevitable. Divided into three sections, Evan Wang's debut chapbook traces the confrontation of the self through a cyclical journey of discovery and contradiction, ultimately leading to the choice of allowance: that which is made by the reader. These poems slowly burn first through our own inner silence, then through the thick dark of night, and finally to abstract closure—or lack thereof. They urge and hold us back, begging us to understand how, amid cultural, societal, and political suppression of the self, we kiss the muscled mouths of the world by carrying our bodies through it. Slow Burn is a romantic's answer to the search for love, and the strangely comforting realization that the effects of the world mark us all.

Foreword by Ching-In Chen
1
Evan
Buddhism in the Morning
Mid-Autumn Sonata

Poem to Keep Me Company
Dog Years
  II
Nocturne with High Waters
Muse for Night
breaking news: ghost of michelle go haunts the afterimages
I Hate It Everywhere
Night Elegy
After I Was Shot
  III
I Could Be So Good
Boy Ghost
Boy Ghost Requiem
Slow Burn
The Whale
 
Acknowledgments