Robert H. Winner Memorial Award

I am very grateful to the friends and family of Robert H. Winner, the Poetry Society of America, and judge Claire Wahmanholm for honoring me this year! You can read two of the poems (from the ten-poem sequence) here.

Claire Wahmanholm on M. Cynthia Cheung:

M. Cynthia Cheung’s sequence of lüshi captures the backrooms where “empire schedules genocide”; it captures the dull dailiness of “drones and their errands”; it swerves from “grasslands parted by hares” to “naked torsos bloom[ing] into craters.” Here, war’s violence is made all the more appalling by its compression into the lüshi’s eight lines. Cheung is tender in her rendering of domestic details, even as “a bathrobe becomes a shroud” and “our ears [are] blown out upon a wall.” These poems are simultaneously brutal and humane, horrifying and compassionate. They are, in other words, completely of our time, and completely unforgettable.