Slow Burn: Poems (Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize) - Softcover

Evan Wang

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810149877 ISBN 13: 9780810149878

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2026

Synopsis

Winner of the 2024 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize

Persistent yet flickering, Slow Burn unveils a passionate world where love is both impossible and inevitable. Divided into three sections, Evan Wang's debut chapbook traces the confrontation of the self through a cyclical journey of discovery and contradiction, ultimately leading to the choice of allowance: that which is made by the reader. These poems slowly burn first through our own inner silence, then through the thick dark of night, and finally to abstract closure—or lack thereof. They urge and hold us back, begging us to understand how, amid cultural, societal, and political suppression of the self, we kiss the muscled mouths of the world by carrying our bodies through it. Slow Burn is a romantic's answer to the search for love, and the strangely comforting realization that the effects of the world mark us all.

About this title

About the Author

Evan Wang is the ninth Northeast Regional Youth Poet Laureate of the United States. His work appears in POETRY Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. He was born in Philadelphia.

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810149877
• ISBN 13: 9780810149878
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 56