A stylistically dazzling novel about things, people, and the forces and seams between them.
In a dark and crooked lane in an unnamed city where it never ceases to snow, a small white box falls from a coat pocket. It is made of paper strips woven tightly together; there is no apparent way to open it without destroying it. What compels a passing witness to this event, a self-described anthrophobe not inclined to engage with other people, to pick up the box and chase after the stranger who dropped it? The Box follows a rectangular cuboid as it changes hands in a collapsing metropolis, causing confluences, conflicts, rifts, and disasters. Different narrators, each with a distinctive voice, give accounts of decisive moments in the box’s life. From the anthrophobe to a newly hired curator of a renowned art collection to a couple who own an antiquarian bookshop to a hotel bartender hiding from a terrible past, the storytellers repeat rumors and rely on faulty memories, grasping at a thing that continually escapes them. Haunting their secondhand recollections is one mysterious woman who, convinced of the box’s good or evil powers, pursues it with deadly desperation. Shortlisted for the US/Canada Republic of Consciousness Prize.
Mandy-Suzanne Wong deftly explores the complex world of the ama — ocean women, mostly elderly, who eke out a living while diving deep to capture abalone, snails, and otherworldly sea creatures for food. Unlike the men of the fictional village of Kaiyono who fish from boats, the ama battle the cold currents without scuba tanks or snorkels. They do this while facing the threat of an ecological crisis they had no hand in causing. Suffused with lyrical imagery and profound longing, Mandy-Suzanne Wong creates evocative moments of love, pride, jealousy, misunderstanding, and sacrifice in this duet of short stories. Winner of the Digging Press Chapbook Series Award and a Wardrobe’s Best Dressed selection, Awabi is in its second edition.
In Listen, we all bleed, radical artists from around the world use recordings of nonhuman voices to plead for an end to violence against nonhuman animals. The essays, novelistic and acutely personal, listen to fishes, whales, coyotes, elephants, chickens, and more. Central to this work is the importance of listening—just listening—as a creative effort that’s also an activist act. An ASLE Book Award finalist, EcoLit Best Book of 2021, SPD nonfiction bestseller, and PEN/Galbraith nominee.
“As far as I know, you can only die once…” But when Aetna Simmons disappears from her lonely Bermuda cottage, she leaves behind not one but ten suicide notes. Ten different suicide notes. And no other trace to speak of, not even a corpse, as if she’d never existed. A Foreword INDIES finalist and PEN Open Book Award nominee, Drafts of a Suicide Note is the darkly enigmatic love letter of Kenji Okada-Caines, a petty criminal who once exposited on English literary classics and now, marooned on his native isle, nurtures an obsession with Aetna’s writing. His murky images of a woman with ten voices and no face launch him into waking nightmares, driving him to confront his lifetime’s worth of failures as a scholar, lover, and opiate addict.
Essays and exhibition catalog, McMaster Museum of Art, January 2020
What are the responsibilities of art? Can it be true that art has no responsibilities except to itself? What about when art is made out of the bodies of murdered animals or trees? … What artist, without breaking their own heart, could consider never making art again?
The relationships between human and nonhuman animals have always been at the heart of our existence. Notions of human superiority, reinforced in the age of enlightenment, have played a fundamental role in where we find ourselves in the 21st century: deep in the human-created catastrophe of the Anthropocene.
The wild is here, right here. Do you listen? Do you really? have you ever let the sounds around you — the nonhuman sounds; the unwanted sounds — interrupt your private telenovella? Referencing the work of sound artists dave phillips, Cathy Lane, Chris DeLaurenti, Hiroki Sasajima and more, Mandy-Suzanne Wong implores us to listen. With illustrations from multidisciplinary artist and eco-feminist activist Kathryn Eddy, Artificial Wilderness is the perfect interruption to daily life. Winner of the Selcouth Station Press Environmental Chapbook Competition.