I like to start by asking: What is a poem to you?

A poem is a pause from drudgery, a gap between dream and life, and a flourishing.

In Oculus (2019) and new work of yours I’ve read, you’re a very research-focused poet. What does your process of synthesizing research into a poem look like?

It varies—sometimes research arrives as lines or facts inside a poem, and then one can unmake the fact with an interpretation or speculation. The poem has a unique ability to both highlight and negate the rules and phenomena of hard science, and so within research there’s such possibility to play.

Your forthcoming book, The Kingdom of Surfaces, works with Chinese mythology, history, and aesthetics to talk about the way feminine Asian bodies are perceived as both spectacle and invisible, and the role of empire and gaze in resulting violence. How do you think about beauty, and how do you see that intersecting with violence?

Beauty is a huge motive of capitalism—beauty is constantly consumed throughout history, and often commodified. Beauty is used to justify so much destruction, violence, and oppression, and I’m particularly interested in the way beauty, especially Asiatic beauty and objects, has been codified throughout history in its relationship to the West. European Aestheticism draws a lot of inspiration from Chinese culture, but with the Opium Wars and late nineteenth-century immigration, they did not see Chinese people as valuable as their objects.

More broadly speaking, do you see poetry as having a responsibility to not just beauty, but also justice? How do you think about beauty, justice, and larger political movements in the context of your own work?

I do see poetry as having a responsibility to justice. All the best poetry is political. Beauty, too, is political—and that is something that forms the premise of The Kingdom of Surfaces. Nothing, not even an aesthetic decision, is completely disconnected from the synergy of politics, of human affairs, of relations. At the center of the book is a collection of poems set in the Met Gala, a show whose premise asked the audience to separate the fantasy from the politics. But the act of bringing forth a fantasy, of realizing a fantasy via creative means, is never neutral—our dreams of beauty will always be tied to our sociopolitical conditions.

You don’t write about romantic love, but your poems often work with questions around intimacy and connection. Do you think reaching for connection and intimacy is a valuable or perhaps inevitable trait in poems?

Yes—a poem is a unique form of connection, as it moves an emotion through time and space, forming an energy between reader and writer. I remember growing up, finding poetry as an unexpected source of human connection. The poet, vulnerable on the page, reaches the reader who might also feel that way. I connected with poems for the messy feelings they were holding, and the existence of these poems meant that someone has felt that once too. This was enough, perhaps, at the moment to fuel me for those lonely days ahead.

What are some books at your bedside?

All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Matthews, A Hundred Lovers by Richie Hofmann, From From by Monica Youn, Junk by Tommy Pico, Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz, and Stay True by Hua Hsu.