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The 8th House

Feng Sun Chen author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Black Ocean

Published:29th Jan '15

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The 8th House cover

By day, Feng Sun Chen works at a nursing home in Minneapolis, by night she creates biting poetry like that found in her much-talked about first book, Butcher’s Tree. In her second collection, The 8th House, Chen peels away the exterior of life’s pink underbelly page by page, smelling the meaning in a mother’s stew, carving light from holy grit, dissecting the surging waves of longing and love. These voices occupy the astrological 8th House, a house known for its healers and perversions, ruled by Pluto, where sex, death, and rebirth intersect and consume one another. Continuing to slice away at the distinctions between self and other, animal and human, male and female, the speaker of these poems “exposes by being exposed.”

“This reviewer found nearly every word in this book to be capital-r 'Right'—and that’s an astounding achievement for any author, in any genre.” —Huffington Post
“This poetry collection wants to plunge itself into your guts and nest there. It wants to engage in corporeal, spiritual, and emotional cannibalism.” —Jacket

“It’s the kind of book that gives a descriptive word like ‘strange’ some core muscle, some hidden teeth.” —Rumpus


“Feng Sun Chen’s pulpy, wincing poems have a core of iron necessity.” —Open Letters

ISBN: 9781939568083

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 172g

93 pages