As Lo Kwa Mei-en, I write books that express my integral relationships with language, emotion, creative structure(s), and grief. My poems range from hyper-intuitive free verse to superdense formalist experiments, and owe their influences to genre forms that range from fairy tale to confessional lyric to space opera.

Poems

“Speculative Song” :: The Offing

“Pinocchia, you must not stop for a friend” :: poets.org

“Aubade for First-Generation Kids” and “Transmission from the Factory” :: Pinwheel

Books

“Lo Kwa Mei-en’s Yearling is brilliant—blindingly smart and lit at midnight—hard and beautiful, so sharp ‘you could baptize a battlefield in it.’ Through its excavation of memory, trauma, girlhood, the body itself, it electrifies form and narrative in poems that are rich, journeyed, dark, resilient. So brave, too, in their song of recovery: wings and war and eggs and maps and scars and somehow, in the morning, vision. I am in awe of this book, will no doubt reread and reread it.” — Anne Marie Rooney

Yearling received the 2013 Kundiman Poetry Prize and is available through Alice James Books. These poems are for readers who enjoy emotional, voice-driven work influenced by the musically mysterious forces of both language and the unspeakable.

“Lo Kwa Mei-en’s second collection rings with ‘bravado’s vibratto.’ …Here, the alien non-citizen disassembles the colony by naming its simulacrum of fear in varying degrees of intimacy: the tourist, the migrant, the stranger, the immigrant. This is ‘the futurist’s job.’ In The Bees Make Money in the Lion, the hive serves as metaphor for a postmodern diaspora—to be at the mercy of a swarm, compliant within the biblical irresistible, an actor in a dys­topian myth disguised as reality. Lo Kwa Mei-en’s speaker pledges not to nation but to story. Her exquisite execution of form works to mythify this speaker, rendering her super capable.” — Ladan Osman

The Bees Make Money in the Lion was chosen by Lesle Lewis, Shane McCrae, and Wendy Xu as the winner of the 2015 CSU Poetry Center Open Book Competition and is available through the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. This book is for readers who enjoy dense, non-linear, experimental poetry that can feel as dark and multifaceted like stones pulled from an alien ocean’s trench.

Two Tales is a chapbook in the form of a lost letter to home that was written in the underworld. This book is composed of prose poems and broken sonnets that recast lines from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Nightingale” into a bent fairy tale of loss and rage. It was chosen as the inaugural chapbook of the Bloom Books imprint of Jellyfish Magazine.

To receive a copy of this chapbook, please email me.