Eileen Chong
Eileen Chong on beauty and truth: a poetics of resistance
Alternating between snippets of poems by others and deeply personal memories and thoughts, Eileen Chong paints a landscape of individual life somehow surviving enmeshed in larger, oppressive networks.
'I am tired of running. My earliest memory is that of being carried while my mother ran, the world blurring by. What do we run from? Stones cut our feet so deeply that the roads we walk are all stained with blood. My mother shows me a scan, and points to a dark shadow where a hole has opened up in her left ventricular chamber. Perhaps it was always there. Her heart keeps on beating. Whole forests are watered by our sweat, by our tears.'