Cover image and design: Monika Lin
Expat Taxes is officially out and available on Amazon and via Seaweed Salad Editions. The book collects poems written over the past decade of living in Shanghai and is anchored by the long poem “Hello 2015” (a chunk of which The Brooklyn Rail published last April).
The original plan was to publish “Hello” as a chapbook, but we soon realized that a number of short poems — some of them published in little magazines, others not — worked well with the longer piece. The book is part of the larger French (Concession) Press project.
This publication also marks the resumption of the Seaweed Salad Editions project, which will expand to publish poetry, alternating between bilingual editions of poetry in translation and volumes of innovative new writing in English (or perhaps better put, one of the many Englishes in currency circa now).
It’s a low-key affair, this publication. At present, I’ll be reading from the book at a launch event in Guangzhou at APTW 2016, celebrating alongside the authors of two other new books, Joshua Ip (Singlish poetry!) and Alexandra Gregori. A Shanghai event is in the works, as is a spring Shanghai International Literary Festival poetry group event. If the health, money, and travel gods smile upon me, there may also be some late spring/early summer readings in the US.
Good to have work that’s been sitting around for a while out, and better to have it out with fresh work. Best to be looking ahead to building Seaweed Salad into a full-blown small press! Any poets or poetry translators or poet-translators interested in future plans for publication of books of poetry in translation, inquire via the Seaweed Salad site. We’ll be starting with a Chinese language poet but beyond that, opening things up. There will be more on future publication plans coming this fall. Stay tuned.…
And last and not least, deepest thanks to my partner in life, work, art, and writing, Monika Lin, without whom this book would not have happened.