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.

EVAN WANG 王潇 is the ninth National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, the first male and East Asian individual to hold this title. His work appears in POETRY Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Waxwing, The Journal, and elsewhere, and has been recognized by the White House, the United Nations, the Smithsonian Institution, and Button Poetry. He was born in Philadelphia and is an undergraduate student at Harvard College.

Foreword by Ching-In Chen


I
Evan/王潇
Buddhism in the Morning
中秋奏鸣曲 / Mid-Autumn Sonata
母念 // 思母
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
新传统
我疼你


Acknowledgments