Stolen Moments, Broken Epics (Preview)

Preview of a subscriber post on Substack on Nellie Wong and Harmony Holiday. In the past month, two articles of mine on two quite different poets appeared in The Poetry Foundation and the newly founded Hythe Review. This post goes into a bit more detail on the background to those pieces and serves as an additional tribute to the late Nellie Wong, who passed away earlier this year. It’ll be followed in the next while by material relating relating to two further recent publications, on jazz poetics and on the relation between jazz and hip hop. More on those in due course. Nellie Wong: Typing BackBased in San Francisco for many years, Nellie Wong features in a chapter of my 2024 book on Boston and Bay Area queer poetry, Never By Itself Alone, focused on her comradeship with fellow poets and activists Merle Woo and Karen Brodine. Wong wrote of labour, of class struggle, of family history. Her first book appeared in the late 1970s, when Kelsey Street Press published Dreams in Harrison…