POETRY & ESSAYS
BOOK
Belladonna*, 2018
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Landia excavates literal and figurative borderlands—redrawn boundaries, architectural palimpsests, underground transport systems—to reckon with the historical and cultural forces that shape our cities and our intimate lives.
Celina Su’s Landia is worldly in the best sense: it is truly about the world. A capacious and much needed response to America’s rising xenophobia... this most sophisticated poetry about our networked society is a set of maps of our shifting and vanishing neighborhoods, tastes and citizenships. “I cannot differentiate the homage from the lament,” Su writes. Landia is both. You will finish it all the wiser.
—Alissa Quart, author of Monetized
A consummate wordsmith, Celina Su’s Landia is a searingly fun collection of imagery and meter. It proves that mapping is as subjective as memory and language, and that the Chinatown movie theater is the center of the universe—until it isn’t.
—Paul Beatty, author of The Sellout
In her impressive debut collection, Celina Su extends the possibilities of the poetic, bringing as much careful attention (and firsthand experience) to the concrete details of what she calls “prosaic subjection” as she does to the syntax and moods of poetic language. In this particular political moment, the poems in Landia feel especially urgent... Landia brings together the freedom of the poetic imagination and the realities of state and corporate power, forcing us to re-think the borders of the literary and of the political.
—Dorothy Wang, author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry
In the dream-real spaces of “succulent mines,” words travel, dart, bleed, and hide like refugees, like aid workers, like artists, like animals, like exiles, like warriors. The unsettled unsettles everywhere. And yet is seen, known, made viscerally apparent in Celina Su’s astonishing poems. Su’s rage is so raw that it pierces your heart, but so beautifully rendered that each fragment is somehow spliced to another’s.
—Cindi Katz, author of Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives
Celina Su’s anti-imperial glossaries and roving dérives seem to evoke a radically different kind of civic engagement. “The physical sensation called homecoming” is diffused across the content of these investigative, self-implicating poems. Su foregrounds the imperial wages of the journalistic or anecdotal travel poem; the geographic sweep of her writing and its historical excavations justifies the otherwise frequently astonishing poetry as a political means, an intuitive conduction between otherwise disparate facts and places. “Between points A and B” obtains a lyric solidarity, and I thrill to that prospect.
—Cam Scott, McNally Jackson Bookstore
* Poetry Foundation Staff Pick for 2018
* Entropy Magazine Best Poetry of 2018 List
* Poetry Society of America "Take Note: Eleven New Collections by Asian American Poets" by Aimee Nezhukumatathil List
REVIEWS
Ordinary State, by Sahar Romani, at Entropy.
Reduced to Wordlessness, by Tse Hao Guang, at Singapore Unbound.
INTERVIEWS
For the Slate Magazine podcast Employee of the Month.
For the Poetry Foundation/ PRX podcast PoetryNow, on Terra Pericolosa.
At Literary Hub, with Vi Khi Nao.
At Brooklyn Poets, as featured Poet of the Week.
CHAPBOOKS
MIEL Books Microseries, 2015
With Ariana Reines, Belladonna* Chaplet Series, 2013
SELECTED NARRATIVE ESSAYS & STORIES
To Take Lightly. Museum of Your Parents' Things.
Missing Persons. CultureStr/ke.
Holiday in Cambodia. n+1.
I am Your Electric Fan. XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics.
SELECTED POEMS
JFK Airport. New York Times Magazine.
Terra Pericolosa. PoetryNow.
Tax Season. Brooklyn Poets.
The Following are Proposed Facticities. Poetry Project.
4 poems. Brooklyn Rail.
Route 1095. Boston Review.
22. Zócalo Public Square.
Excerpt from Notes on the Shape of Absence. Poem-a-Day, Academy of American Poets.
JFK Airport. The Margins.
Critical Care; In 2044, A Waning Moon; The 403 Is Not Verboten; This Augmented Fantasy of the Known. In Devouring the Green: Fear of a Human Planet: An Anthology of New Writing Paperback by Sam Witt (Editor), Christopher J. Arabadjis (Illustrator), and Debra Di Blasi.
Bloody Paper Pulp. Almost Five Quarterly.
Aubade: At the Bus Shelter. Sand, Issue 9.
Swami Youth League, March 1971. The Margins.
Una Abuelita Para Cada Plaza Pública. Edna.
Between the Chifa and the Red Lanterns. Drunken Boat, Volume 16.
Growing Watermelons. 580 Split, Issue 13.
Sleep-Deprived, Mobile My Socioeconomic; Governmentality. Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology.
We Shopped Sweat. Open City.
Means-Tested Manifesto. Truck.
5 poems. Action, Yes, Volume 1, Issue 14.
To Steal Oneself; I'm Stuck. Aufgabe, Issue 9.
Postcarded in Cuba; These Strengths and Difficulties. Sous Rature, 2ssue, Winter.
All the Same. HazMat Review, Volume 10, Issue 2.
Chai-Dan Submits Three Aims. 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Volume 6.
Titration; Hear Us Our Call Upon Duct Tape. Diner, Volume 5, Number 2.
Split Ends. Indefinite Space.
Senators Join Hands, to Want. Lilies and Cannonballs Review, Volume 2, Number 1.