Humans
- Amanda [Ngoho] Reavey (author)
- JooYoung Choi (artist)
ISBN
0986050539
978-0-9860505-3-4
LCCN
2015915580
Page count
130
Keywords
Poetry, Prose, Visual Poetry, Documents, Documentation, Documentary, Archive, Immigrant, Immigration, Family, Body, Identity, Asian, Asian American, Philippines, Filipino, Ancestry, Culture
Publication date
2016
Language(s)
English
Publication media type
Print Document
Hybrid
Publication series
Unlimited Editions
Marilyn
Winner of the 2017 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book of Creative Writing (Poetry). Amanda [Ngoho] Reavey’s first book, MARILYN, began as an exploration through somatic experiments on what it means to stay and became a fragmented map of the immigration system, the international adoption process, and family. How do you articulate disenfranchised grief? How does a person who has no origin write herself into existence? What happens when all you have left is, as Sarita Echavez See says, ‘the body to articulate loss’? Framed by a return trip to the Philippines in 2011, her first time back since leaving, Reavey takes the most intense images [real, imagined, dreamed] encountered while living in-between six different countries, and expunges them in attempt to stitch the Asian, diasporic body. The result is an ancestral line, a path back not to the beginning of life nor just before, but rather to the primordial. To ancestral roots. To orality: a name.
“Amanda [Ngoho] Reavey has written a work of loss, healing and place. What is a page, both before and after a radical fire? What does it mean to come to language again as to life? Reavey answers these questions through her many attempts in this book, and beyond it, to breathe, create, survive, think and be.” — Bhanu Kapil
“MARILYN combines lyric essay, documentary image, and visual poetry to investigate origin, identity, and transformation. The multiple literary forms speak to the work’s thematic preoccupations with ‘camouflage and adaptability and shapeshifting,’ all concerns of the diasporic body. The author renames herself, moving the work beyond literary convention into performative, conceptual, and shamanistic contexts: ‘The name I go by now is ‘Ngoho.’ It is a verb.’ A verb expresses action. This is an active work by an active mind.” — Amy Catanzano
About the Contributor(s)
Born in the Philippines, raised in Wisconsin, Amanda [Ngoho] Reavey is a poet, a Reiki practitioner and a cellist interested in plant spirit communication and healing. A graduate of the MFA Writing & Poetics program at Naropa University, her work appears in Construction Magazine, Galatea Resurrects #23 and The Volta, among others. Reavey currently works as Marketing Director at Woodland Pattern Book Center.
Follow Amanda [Ngoho] Reavey on Twitter @AmandaReavey.
Through painting, video, sculpture, animation, and music, multi-disciplinary artist JooYoung Choi documents the interconnecting narratives of a highly structured, expansive fictional land called the Cosmic Womb. This paracosm stretches over approximately 6,732 miles, and is governed by Queen Kiok, with the help of six humanoid creatures called Tuplets (Lady K, Aidee Three, Emo Flowers (No. 36), Kun-Yook Six, Lydia “Nine” Fletcher, Haneul-Sek aka Nina Blue and one Earthling from Concord, NH named C.S. Watson.) Guided by the Cosmic Womb mythology, Choi creates work that merges the autobiographic with the fantastic into a visual form.
The narrative of this imaginary world is used as a tool to investigate a variety of themes such as: representation as affirmation, racism and systemic oppression, personal/political identity, and memory. Her work intends specifically to:
1. Address challenging issues through playful narratives,
2. Develop formally compelling imagery, and to
3. Engage viewers in a manner that is accessible and invokes curiosity, learning, and discourse.
JooYoung Choi, born in Seoul, South Korea, immigrated to Concord, New Hampshire in 1983 by way of adoption. While completing her BFA at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, she returned to South Korea and reunited with her birth-family. Since receiving her MFA from Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Choi’s artwork has been exhibited in such venues as The Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, Seattle, Washington; The National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, Illinois; and Lawndale Art Center, Houston, Texas. Choi’s work has been featured by numerous media groups and publications, including the Korean Global News Network YTN, Houston’s PaperCity, Nat. Brut, and Huffington Post. She is an Artadia finalist for 2015.
