Careen

If life is but a series of contiguous movements, CAREEN investigates the reasons one might momentarily lose all control and fall out of line. What is the nature of a desire? What are the consequences of uninhibited longing? How do we come to terms with the systematic conditions and lineages tethered to our individual lives? Any hunger for inclusion calls back to a long history of displacement. Then, "eventually, every color careens into its own lack," and the carte blanche of whiteness that envelopes a racialized nation is deftly overturned. On a journey in search for a home, CAREEN is a love note plunging headlong into its objects of unattainable desire.   Grace Shuyi Liew (she/they) is a queer writer & poet. Born & raised in Malaysia, a former British colony, Grace writes of migration, sexuality, and transnational lineages. She is currently revising her first novel, a queer thriller set in a fictional gambling city in Malaysia. Grace has been awarded a Center for Fiction Fellowship, Tin House writer-in-residence, MacDowell Fellowship, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Fellowship from the Community of Writers, Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Award (Finalist 2022), Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts with US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, Aspen Summer Words scholarship, resident writer at Can Serrat in Barcelona, Watering Hole Fellowship, Ahsahta Press Chapbook Prize, and many others. Grace has written a poetry collection, Careen (Noemi Press, 2019), named Electric Literature's "14 Unmissable Poetry Books of 2019, "Bustle's" 26 New Poetry Collections By LGBTQIA+ Writers To Look Out For In 2019, "Entropy Magazine's" Best Poetry Books of 2019, "Bookriot's" Queer Poetry Collections to Read During National Poetry Month," and more. She has been anthologized in 2019 Best of the Net. Grace lives in Brooklyn, New York, with their partner, dog, and cat. They studied philosophy and now teaches various workshops, serves The Trevor Project as a crisis counselor, and sometimes hosts a local queer collective.   "Careen is a battlefield of conflicting desires, a place where words are dragged from the liminal engine of Grace's 'kinetically charged' soul into the broad daylight of racial politics. A place where it's impossible to dodge the inevitable bullets aimed at whiteness and its whitened landscape. Her work swells with infinite breast songs shaped to evoke and choke all exit doors towards a place where poetry doesn't exist as an aftermath. Her poetry is designed to stay current, to enrapture, and also a place to 'reveal [her] private galaxy of bruises.' Are her words bruises? Grace's Careen will drape a white sheet over you." - Vi Khi Nao "Sharp in their vulnerability, the poems in Grace Shuyi Liew's Careen are injurious wounds, moving through a cavernous politics, breaking off, turning in, and restructuring memory as scaffolding, pain as terrifying recurrence. This work is jolting in its refusal to reign in its rageful grief. Shuyi Liew disarms language in order to disarm us, leaving us little room burrow in our fear." - Raquel Salas Rivera "'To whom do you give the potential to seize the whole space of you?' Grace Shuyi Liew, of course. She brings it all: fairy tales and video games, fetish, sex, and politics, perennial mothers and daughters jumping off cliffs, global cities and statelessness. Here dreams are real, and worlds careen refracted in and across time. Go for the ride." - Gabrielle Civil