Poet Jenny Liou joins LARB Editor-In-Chief Michelle Chihara to talk about Muscle Memory, Liou’s vulnerable and intense series of autobiographical poems about Chinese American ancestry, family, and about Jenny’s time as a Mixed Martial Arts cage fighter. It’s a book about prizefighting and training, but also about quiet moments and gardening and becoming a mother.
Jenny did martial arts as a kid, ran track in college, and then started training at a jiu jitsu gym during her time in graduate school. Eventually, that led to a career as a professional fighter for a variety of outfits, including Invicta, the pioneering women’s fighting organization that was a pipeline to the UFC. She has an undergrad degree in biology and graduate degrees in English and writing, and she now teaches at a college in the Pacific Northwest, where she lives with her two small kids. Muscle Memory draws on all of her complicated paths through different forms of competition and different kinds of loyalties.
Michelle and Jenny were actually in grad school together, and their conversation ranges across their shared history, from readings in the trailer park on campus where students lived in a tangle of vintage AirStreams and chicken coops and had “Trailer Park Poetry Readings," to the present day. They talk across the different disciplines of writing and fighting, about how it feels to be in the cage, about who we fight and why and how. We use the word “identity” a lot these days, but Jenny’s poems and this conversation delve into all of the contradictory and complex currents that truly drive us.
Also, McKenzie Wark, author of Raving, returns to recommend Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn’t My Rapist by Cecilia Gentili.
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