About the project

“The living and the dead share an interest in the future.”

– M. NourbeSe Philip

The Poetics of Haunting is a digital project based on a scholarly manuscript, Going Toward the Ghost: The Poetics of Haunting in Contemporary Asian American Poetry, by Jane Wong. A poet and scholar, she is the author of Overpour and How to Not Be Afraid of Everything and is an Associate Professor at Western Washington University.

This project considers how social, historical, and political contexts “haunt” the work of contemporary Asian American poets. How does history – particularly the history of war, colonialism, and marginalization – impact the work of Asian American poets across time and space? How does language act as a haunting space of intervention and activism? A poetics of haunting insists on invocation: a deliberate, powerful, and provocative move toward haunted places. This site features audio and video conversations, poetry, photographs, and multimodal ephemera.

The Poetics of Haunting is generously supported by the University of Washington’s Simpson Center for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities. With gratitude to Kundiman.

Cover illustration: Minh Nguyen
Website design: Eric John Olson