Books distributed by the Chicago Distribution Center
ISBN (pbk): 9781803091648
ISBN (ebook): 9781803091655
Published April 2023
Acre Books is proud to partner with Seagull Books, an independent Indian publishing house established in 1982, specializing in world literature and English translations. Honoring our singular mission to promote diverse and absorbing works, we maintain a featured space for select titles from Seagull’s catalog. This season’s picks come from the Pride List, edited by Sandip Roy and Bishan Samaddar, which celebrates queer expression and showcases LGBTQ+ lives across languages, cultures, and genres.
Decapitated Poetry
Poems from a boisterously out and open queer voice from Taiwan.
Ko-Hua Chen
Translated by Wen-Chi Li and Colin Bramwell
Ko-hua Chen’s Decapitated Poetry was the first explicitly queer book of poems published in Taiwan and remains a foundational work in Taiwanese poetry. Decades after it first appeared in 1995, this collection retains the capacity to shock, appall, and jolt readers into recognizing homosexuality as its own specific category of being. Behind Chen’s depictions of the disjunctive realities of queer erotic life, a formidable and uncompromising poetic intelligence can be seen at play. Alongside the erotic, satirical offerings from Decapitated Poetry, this volume includes selections from Chen’s remarkable sci-fi sequences that offer further transcorporeal meditations on forbidden queer love. Excoriating, heretical, tender, and always alive to the transgressive potential of language, this exhilarating volume from Seagull’s Pride List is the perfect introduction to one of Taiwanese poetry’s most daring voices.
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