UC San Diego

transpacific is a manuscript of poems spanning 2015-2024, with a majority of poems . The manuscript is divided into four chapters, East, Dyke, West, & Faggot. Each chapter includes a set of 16 poems. transpacific, rather than considering a linear narrative, considers trans as an expansive prefix, and pacific as a zone of activation, more than as a static place. The journey represented in this text is more about movement and expansion of the body than it is about crossing or transiting two countries/continents. Benjamin writes about collection as “a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order”, collecting is “a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value- that is, their usefulness- but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate.” The collector is merely a hoarder whose hoard contains an ascertainable logic from the outside. The poems in this manuscript are collected, or montaged, rather than written through. As a “collector” or “hoarder”, my main challenge in sifting through and structuring the work was finding a framework that could hold the poems and distill a certain kind of order to the reader that did not necessarily narrativize or flatten my experiences and identities. The four chapters, EAST, DYKE, WEST, and FAGGOT attempt to do that mapping. In Chinese landscape paintings, perspective is not fixed, but experiential: what can be seen in the final image includes multiple vantage points, as the painter tries to capture the scene as they experienced it, rather than as a static depiction from a specific angle. Similarly, in my manuscript East and West, rather than representing the global East and West, are considered from the body’s point of view, focusing on the east and west coasts of both the United States and Taiwan. The conversation between land and water is also a conversation about constructed binaries, which mirrors the conversation about gender: Coasts, earthquakes, islands, tides, all things that throw our stable containers of Water and Land into dispute. The other two chapters, Dyke and Faggot, both take their titles from “reclaimed” slurs with alternate, object-based meaning. Both are used pejoratively to refer to those with not only homosexual preferences, but also the inability to perform a socially acceptable gender. In the manuscript, Dyke, considers lesbianism as identity, community, and as practice, and centers primarily poems about my desire for other people. Faggot, on the other hand, centers poems about my desires for bodily growth and change.