Quarto 2020 Chapbook Contest Runner Up
Click on the image below to read a PDF version of Thomas’s chapbook.
Illustration by Dora O’Neill
Thomas Wee is a writer based in New York and a senior studying English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Born and raised in Evanston Illinois, they began writing short fiction and poetry in high school. Academically, their interests include: Modernism, semiotics, translation, Asian American literature, and digital humanities.
A writer of poetry, fiction, and mixed media work, they are currently working on a short story collection and a novel. A piece of their short fiction will be featured in the upcoming Meridian Anthology of New Writing published by Drunken Boat and Asia Pacific Writers & Translators (November 2020).
The chapbook "New and Used Poems" represents poems accumulated over several years of writing, the earliest written in Summer 2018 and the most recent written in Fall of 2020. Together, they cohere loosely around themes of grief, inheritance, cultural assimilation/decay, liminality, and memory. These poems are primarily inspired by the poet's early loss of their father, and their experiences as a mixed-race, Chinese-American, queer person.
Formally, these poems explore the relationship between language and memory, and specifically the way memory and language degrade and fail. The opening introductory triad of poems, grouped under the title "Generation Loss", deals with this theme the most explicitly through its method of composition via online translation algorithms.
The three photographs, meant to accompany this poem and the chapbook as a whole, are an image of the poet's grandfather and extended family, taken in their village in Taishan, China. This photograph was compressed and duplicated several times, with each copy degrading its quality slightly and introducing artifacts, noise, and other elements of deterioration. These photographs are meant to reinforce the chapbook's themes, and prompt thinking about the relationships between different forms of decay: cultural, material, mnemonic and digital.