Hypoderm: Notes to Myself

The idea for this book, says Weyman Chan, is simple---approach the world as metaphor, and it will come to you. Subtitled "notes to myself," hypoderm is a manifesto of observations, intimations and recognitions of mortality that get under the poet's skin---that remind the reader that poetry is documentation and speculation, not a sentimental fabrication of the rapture (rupture) of our "end times." Drawing on cosmologies as disparate as molecular biology, Chinese and Mayan celestial cycles, and the conflict of Horus and Seth in Egyptian mythology, Chan finds everywhere the recognition that: "As all prey let out/sounds of deepest obligation/when they're caught, so/the binding surronds."

hypoderm is an expansive book of poetic exaltations that plugs a hole in the comfortable metaphor of "Notes to Myself." Chan sets the poem up for target practice with his sights set to correct the faulty ballistics of the predictable lyric fingerprint. And that he does this in the realm of the domestic and the quotidian invokes the poem as spectacle of the gunfight in the Henny Penny corral. "Big bang lobal" poems that cry out for the "whips." Itchy trigger spirits here and they "can stand up in court."---Fred Wah

Inventive, startling, and deft, this book challenges us to see in poetry both symptom and root, eruption and secret.---Rita Wong

hypoderm graphs the geometry of the everyday: Chan maps the borders and the fence; the lines between friends and family, between forgive and forget. Those same lines trace across our palms, our faces and our histories.---derek beaulieu

A poetry not of arrival, but of reaching towards edges. As at home in concrete images of the daily, as the quantum uncertainties of distant elsewhens.---Sarah Murphy