Arlene Ang is the author of The Desecration of Doves (2005), Secret Love Poems(Rubicon Press, 2007), Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon (Texture Press, 2008), a collaborative book with Valerie Fox, and Seeing Birds in Church Is a Kind of Adieu (Cinnamon Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in ambit, Caketrain, Diagram, Poetry Ireland, Poet Lore, Rattle, Salt Hill as well as the Best of the Web anthologies 2008 and 2009 (Dzanc Books). She lives in a small town just outside Venice, Italy.
Beware: in Arlene Ang’s poetry, a wedding cake can be a flytrap and the body a prison uniform. Zizek commands, “Enjoy your symptom.” Banned for Life commands us to enjoy its nightmares, which could be ours. And we can: Ang’s splendid surreal imagination, gift for searing juxtaposition, and kick-ass catalogs permit our jouissance to rise above stunned recognition of agonies.
— Thomas Fink, author of Joyride and A Different Sense of Power
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Arlene Ang's collection, Banned for Life, aims to fix our gaze upon the body--the exposed brain, the voicebox, the swallowed tongue--and does not let us "look away, as if to avoid infection." These poems speak of the always-present threat of erasure via the gun, the knife, and the worm, exposing the violence reflected in unlatched windows, hallway mirrors and glass eyes. Between these pages, the occult language of commonplace objects will make you squirm and shiver. Ang offers us fragments of the dreams we have forgotten, a glimpse of crows, of rising waters and crashing cars, taking the ephemeral and giving it a startling permanence and solidity.
— Susan Slaviero, author of Cyborgia and Selections From The Murder Book
Arlene Ang’s poems are devoted wraiths tracking queries of what does and doesn’t belong, what it means to belong to a place, what is here, what left and what, if anything, will return. These wraiths compel us to examine what appears in our midst, how we acknowledge these appearances and what we accept and disregard. An exquisitely unhinged collection.
— Reb Livingston, author of Bombyonder