Slow Burn

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.

“Slow Burn limns the fissures of the self and its myriad contradictions with fervor and with startling emotional precision. These high-voltage poems will seize you, fueled as they are by sonic sensuousness and lush image-making. Wang’s bold intelligence and heart ignite each page.”

- Jenny Xie, author of Eye Level and The Rupture Tense

“Evan Wang’s Slow Burn has managed what many poets strive their whole lives to achieve. These poems reach their fingers out and touch the contours of divinity. There is a holiness in each measured line. Wang writes, “I am all touch and no hands. But this is me / at my most beautiful.” Well, this is poetry at its most beautiful. How lucky are we? To witness the staggering depth of this new voice as it announces itself to the world. ”

- Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Whiting Award recipient