Organs of Little Importance

Advance praise for Organs of Little Importance: “Organs of Little Importance is a riotous feat. Mixing registers with an ease born of a pained listening, Chung names the isolations, the absurdities, the machinations of our mediated moments. Underpinning these poems of desire and observation, the difficult retrievals of a fraught mother daughter relationship. This is a book of presence and alienation that assays as often as it represents. Ferocious. Funny. Deeply intelligent. Adrienne Chung leaves a charred wake.” —Solmaz Sharif “Adrienne Chung dies repeatedly and is reborn on repeat through the sonnet, but one of the many forms her plaintive brilliance demolishes and resurrects in Organs of Little Importance, a marvelous debut. From Jungian analysis and Joni Mitchell to Disney trauma and the blue of noon, Chung’s San Francisco breathes its many lineages’ despairs into her bleak enumerations and her wicked, satisfying rhymes. She always wins, but in that pyrrhic, poetic way that refuses to let such triumph ever be enough. So true. So good.” —Ariana Reines “Adrienne Chung's poems are visionary, they thrill as they burrow into unusual crevices of feeling, offering up both sly little revelations and a superabundance of insight. I loved this twisted guidebook to living in a present populated largely by ghosts.” —Alexandra Kleeman “It should be an impossible thing, but obviously I’m wrong, that a book of poems could be both immensely pleasurable and intensely introspective, could revel in the absurdities of daily life and plumb psychic depths, and perform these contraries with unstinting grace and intelligence—but Adrienne Chung has written just such a book. Our poet here is chimerical, hyphenate: psychoanalyst-philosopher-formalist-confessor-theologian-dreamer-neuroligist. Line by line these poems can flit by as quick as a swipe left or right on a phone; just as true, line by line these poems can build to that pregnant pause of utmost human irony, where the work of memory leads to the inevitability of oblivion, and our mother-issues are simply the more immediate manifestations of our age-old crisis: that I didn’t make myself, but myself am made. Kind of like a poem. Immediate pleasures will keep you turning page to page, but long after every page has been turned, a deep and difficult wisdom remains, haunting, honest, and brave.” —Dan Beachy-Quick “'This was how/I loved her: devotion to a specter,' writes Adrienne Chung, in her extraordinary collection. Here the poet writes about her mother who is a figure—irregular, extravagant, damaged, and damaging—who haunts the pages of this book. The poems too are extravagant, full, funny, poignant, perceptive, and Chung’s tremendous talent for careful discernment is found everywhere throughout. Psychologically adroit, formally complex and with an ear tuned to the beauty of our language, Organs of Little Importance is, in fact, an important and memorable debut.” —Mark Wunderlich