num_pages: 156
description: * Winner of the 2015 Essay Collection Competition Selected by Wayne Koestenbaum *Rarely have I come across tenderness venom and fire held so intimately so exquisitely as in Lily Hoangs A Bestiary. This book would be impressive enough as a collection of finely-forged fragments but as it weaves itself into an even more impressive whole my hat came off. Lily Hoang writes like she has nothing to lose and everything at stake. Maggie NelsonA Bestiary is a work of great subtlety precision intelligence daring and emotive keenness. It seems completely contemporary (by which I mean that it is unlike anything Ive read and that it makes me want to change my own writerly procedures). With headlong reckless improvisatory gestures Lily Hoang prompts us to rethink what literature today can dare to aspire to. Her intellectually magnanimous books position on the threshold between recognizable literature and some other vanguard form of performance/utterance made me feel happy and stimulated and dizzy (in a rapturous way) while I was reading it. Wayne KoestenbaumThe most perfect use of fragmentation myth language fairytale and terrible beauty that I have ever seen in my life. Im swooning. My faith in what writing can be has been restored. Lidia YuknavitchLily Hoang is the author of four books including Changing recipient of a PEN Open Books Award. She has two novels forthcoming: Old Cat Lady and The Book of Martha and she co-edited the anthology The Force of Whats Possible: Writers on Accessibility and the Avant-Garde. She teaches in the MFA program at New Mexico State University where she is Associate Department Head. She serves as Prose Editor at Puerto del Sol and Non-Fiction Editor at Drunken Boat.
language: English
title: A Bestiary
publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center