How to Write an Essay is an attempt for the time being. These poems take seriously John D'Agata's question-and-answer: "What is a lyric essay? It's an oxymoron: an essay that's also a lyric; a kind of logic that wants to sing; an argument that has no chance of proving anything." Trying and failing, in other words, is a complete poetics. In lyrics and broken prose, Lucy Xiang-fu Wainger interrogates desire, memory, the dialectic between thinking and feeling, and what it means to have once been a child. Read and know that you are the exact, specific person to whom she is speaking.
LUCY XIANGFU WAINGER is from New York City. Her debut chapbook In Life There Are Many Things (Black Lawrence, 2023) won the Black River Chapbook competition. She currently lives in Chicago and works as a fifth-grade assistant teacher.