Michael Leong

Michael Leong is the author of the poetry books e.s.p. (Silenced Press, 2009); Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions, 2012); Who Unfolded My Origami Brain? (Fence Digital, 2017); and Words on Edge (Black Square Editions, 2018). He has also published a translation of the Chilean poet Estela Lamat, I, the Worst of All (BlazeVOX [books], 2009). His co-translation, with Ignacio Infante, of Vicente Huidobro’s long poem Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven was published by co•im•press in 2020.

His critical book Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2020) analyzes why so many contemporary poets have turned to source ma­terial, from newspapers to governmental records, as inspiration for their poetry. Examining the use of documents in the works of Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Amiri Baraka, Claudia Rankine, M. NourbeSe Philip, and others, Contested Records demonstrates how official records can evoke a wide range of emotions—from hatred to veneration, from indifference to empathy, from desire to disgust. Ultimately, Leong finds that if bureaucracy and documentation have the power to police and traumatize through the exercise of state power, then so, too, can document-based poetry function as an unofficial, counter­hegemonic, and popular practice that authenticates marginalized experiences at the fringes of our cultural memory.

He teaches in the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts and lives in Los Angeles.