Very taken with Rita Wong's forage lately. It's an incredibly full book, confronting so many different issues and taking on so much complexity. I thought a useful way to start summing up why I like this book so much might be to list in general terms the subject of some of the different poems. The list soon spiraled out of control, and I was just skimming the surface of her poetry: genetic engineering, US patents of wheat, seeds, grains, transgenic pigs, laundry toxins, chinese launderers, native american naming, chinese remedies, war, resistance, discarded computer toxins, oil, economy, smog, body toxins, prisons, wealth, weaponry, chinese language, capitalism, consumerism, endangered species, food, powell street, pride, connection.

It's a serious book, but also ironic ("disaffect, reinfect me.") and playful. Many pages have quotations in hand-written script scrolling along the sides, or Chinese characters nestled among the poems. The visual effect is one of having access into an author's notebook, where ideas and observations ferment among foraged materials. It's a subtle balance of political and personal, an organic panoply of affront at the myriad outrages committed on, by, and for us. Which us? Many us-es. It's a complex text, sensitive to the constantly shifting power imbalances that configure status in the hyper-capitalized, post-colonial, globalized world.

One of my favorite poems in forage:

canola queasy

vulture capital hovers over dinner tables, covers hospitals a sorrowful shade of canola, what gradient decline in the stuck market, what terminal severity in that twenty-year monopoly culled the patent regime, its refrain of greed, false prophets hawk oily platitudes in rapacity as they engineer despair in those brilliant but foolish yellow genetically stacked prairie crops. how to converse with the willfully profitable stuck in their monetary monologue? head-on collisions create more energy but who gets obliterated? despite misgivings i blurt, don't shoot the messy angels with your cell-arranging blasts, don't document their properties in order to pimp them, the time for business-as-usual died with the first colonial casualty. reclaim the long now. hey bloated monstrosity: transcribe your ethics first or your protein mass shall turn protean mess and be auctioned off in the stacked market and so you can reap endless cussed stunts.

- Rita Wong