In Life There Are Many Things

Overview

In Life There Are Many Things is a portrait of adolescent mental illness after the end of history: “I have / this body— / residue—and I don’t know what / left it.” This chapbook’s unmoored speakers seek, alternately, to root themselves more firmly in the world and to exit it entirely. Autobiography and allegory merge to track the inexplicable shapeshifting of the self as it ages, heals, dies, and lives again.

Author Biography

Lucy Xiang-fu Wainger is a poet from New York City. Her debut chapbook In Life There Are Many Things (Black Lawrence Press, 2023) won the Black River Chapbook Competition. She received her MFA from UMass Amherst and currently lives in Chicago, where she is a fifth grade assistant teacher.