QUEENZENGLISH.MP3: POETRY | PHILOSOPHY | PERFORMATIVITY
Edited by Kyoo Lee
Roof Books is proud to present Queenzenglish.mp3: poetry | philosophy | performativity.
Editor Kyoo Lee describes QE3 as an anthology “focusing on the expressive diversity of English in transition. Fifty+ poets, writers, and scholars coming together here show, telegraphically, ways in which they creatively engage the world of dynamic ‘Englishing’ and its polyphonic futurity.” As she explains:
“‘Queenzenglish’ choreographed here, a punceptual play on the ‘Queen’s English,’ addresses the differential mechanisms of control and creativity, which manifest themselves so clearly and wildly in the current social and political climate where glocal borderlessness often remains a costly rhetoric only a few queens could afford.”
Queenzenglish, a translingual initiative translating English into English, decolonizes writing and makes the concepts of diversity and pluralism not only legible but palpable. Among the fifty+ perspectives embodied in this dynamic assemblage of poems, prose, performance scores and experimental / theoretical expositions, readers will find various vocal positions resonances, (trans)nationalities and genders, each addressing in its own creative and critical ways questions around standards, power, limitations and aspirations.
Writers include:
Dohra Ahmad • Dina Al-Kassim • Steven Alvarez • Kostas Anagnopoulos
Bruce Andrews • Rae Armantrout • Daisy Atterbury • Caleb Beckwith
Caroline Bergvall • Lee Ann Brown • Laynie Browne • Vahni Capildeo
Chia-Lun Chang • Valentine Conaty • Jonathan P. Eburne
Tongo Eisen-Martin • Norman Fischer • Michael Gottlieb
Carla Harryman • Erica Hunt • Paolo Javier • Vincent Katz • erica kaufman
Kyoo Lee w/ Amy Evans Bauer & Laura Wetherington (annotators)
Virginia Lucas w/ Jen Hofer (translator) • E.J. McAdams
Thurston Moore • Tracie Morris • Eileen Myles • Shelagh Patterson
Julie Patton • Marjorie Perloff • M. NourbeSe Philip • Sarah Riggs
Kit Robinson • Dannie Ruth • Jocelyn Saidenberg & M. Ty • Sophie Seita
James Sherry • Simon Shieh • Rommi Smith • Christopher Soto
Keijiro Suga • Scott Thurston • Edwin Torres • Robin Tremblay-McGaw
The Urban Mythfits • Jeffrey Yang • Yanyi
QE3’s futuristic curation by Q aka Kyoo Lee promotes translingual generativity and political heterogeneity as hallmarks of public justice, a working democracy of letters, for instance. As Caroline Bergvall puts in her “Onward Afterword”:
“Although this anthology is a literary poetic volume, written by a great many hands, it is built and seems to want to function like a grammar or a manual for the sociolinguistic study of a region with topical testimonies and local ethnographic samples provided.
The expansive inclusive terms of Queenzenglish allows poetry to again take centre stage in the debate around the nature of language. Implicitly it might well also aim to reframe the difficult and longstanding relation in the West between poetry and marginality, between poetry and excentered knowledge.”