In Cahoots with the Rabbit God

Award-winning poet Chen Chen makes his prose debut with this collection of essays that both charms and challenges. Beginning with a collage featuring the author in a glorious wig before moving into a series of half-flirty, half-prayerful letters addressed to a queer Chinese deity, this is not your typical craft book.

Chen Chen's In Cahoots with the Rabbit God upends notions of the poet as pure ethereal being, always singing, eternally solitary. In place of lofty transcendence, these socially engaged and deeply personal essays/interventions bring the discussion of poetry back down to earth, back to the body and the senses, back to sensual experience and everyday life. Instead of a god who towers above it all, at the heart of this book is a god who curls up beside you as you procrastinate on your writing by waiting for some guy to text you back.

What is poetry? Chen keeps asking throughout this collection that ultimately defies categorization. One of his answers: "overfeeling and overlanguaging." Another of his answers: "a soup dumpling spot." From encountering racism while in line for the bathroom to contemplating what Sailor Moon has to teach us about rage, every page of this book invites us to a fuller, zanier conversation about writing, living, and embracing the actually sacred wherever one finds it.