Book Proposal for Sming Sming Books
Title: Dirty Laundry
Description: Dirty Laundry is a poetry chapbook with a strong visual component. It is a diary of sorts, belonging to a fictional, unnamed woman who washes her clothes and writes poems about her lovers. For form, I take inspirations from concrete poetry, and Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings, which is the facsimile reproduction of Dickinson's envelope poems published by New Directions. The images I want to use are photographs I took of clothes slowly taking in water and sinking. All of the clothes are underwear and lingerie, intimate items of clothing that have a tactility and history. Underwear are also called "unmentionables"; they are meant to be kept hidden, invisible. The act of cleaning the garments means they have been worn. There is a mental association with the female nude, but the image of the woman who wore the clothes is never revealed. Her experiences are told in the poems, the titles of which have the date of the wearing and the date of the washing, and the initials of her lovers. The tone is confessional, intimate, and sensorial.
Below are some examples of images and poems. However, the exact order and shape of this book is not yet complete. Between now and the project starting date, additional photographs will be taken and poems will be written.
About JiaJing Liu:
JiaJing is a writer and translator living in San Francisco. She is an alumna of Voices of Our Nations Arts workshops and LitCamp. She regularly participates in readings in San Francisco, including appearances at LitQuake and LitCrawl. Her reporting and non-fiction writings have appeared in Hmm Daily, Popula, and others.
She has worked on translation projects for Chinatown Media and Arts Collaborative, artist Summer Meiling Lee, the Asian Art Museum, and SFMOMA.
More examples of her editorial and translation work can be found here. Click here to download CV.
Examples of images:
Examples of poems:
