echolalia echolalia by Jane Shi

In Jane Shi’s echolalia echolalia, commitment and comedy work together to critique ongoing inequities, dehumanizing ideologies, and the body politic. Here are playful and transformative narratives of friendship and estrangement, survival and self-forgiveness. Writing against inherited violence and scarcity-producing colonial projects, Shi expresses a deep belief in one’s chosen family, love and justice.

Praise for echolalia echolalia:

“echolalia echolalia left me in a state of wonder. Who are we in relation to our echoes and those who we echo? In an exuberant debut, Shi searches for definition and distinction alongside a desire to be connected and multitudinous, asking ‘how do you say help me in yr language.’ Shi extends her poetics in all directions with silky skill. Language flourishes in the realm of a poet like this.”
– T. Liem, author of Slows: Twice and Obits.

“Jane Shi’s echolalia echolalia is a gorgeous, sticky griefsong to the body, soaked in loss and nostalgia. These unruly, precise poems sting with rage and betrayal. They usher us through cycles of crisis and childhood, innocence and illusion, while offering us powerful portraits of life-anchoring friendship and community care. These poems twist in form and shape and voice; they are dexterous and intimate. I never knew how much I needed these anti-anthems. They shook me awake.”
– Maneo Mohale, author of Everything is a Deathly Flower

“From the tender to the absurd, the poems in this book lovingly agitate and stretch us towards a world that resounds with precise, tenacious life. From mushrooms failing to forget to unabashed magnolias to ancestral humour in contemporary times, echolalia echolalia reorganizes our neural networks and our communities towards living in ‘quantum entanglement.’ Curiosity and compassion sprout up in the channels and chambers that Shi opens up with rigor and generosity.”
– Rita Wong, author of forage and monkeypuzzle

“In this electric, eclectic collection, Jane Shi weaves, ducks, swerves, and composes poems like an acrobat swinging across the distance of time. The book is a virtuosic feat in bending away from, twirling, curling, unfurling from the left margin with lines that electrify. Shi is a poet unlike anyone else, and I welcome any extended stay in their worlds.”
– Diana Khoi Nguyen, author Root Fractures and Ghost Of

“An anthem for the chronically ill and chronically online, echolalia echolalia sings with the complicated queer love we need to keep other alive. These poems are tricksters of form that play rough with colonial grammar, guided by a keen eye for satire that never loses sight of the urgency for marginalized kin to survive on our own terms.”
– Rebecca Salazar, author of sulphurtongue

Jury Citations:

“echolalia echolalia is a collection of poems that constantly twists and strives toward a shifting light. It tends to structure in a way that is at times particular and reassuring, and at other times a fascinating and feral reordering of voice and vision. Shi writes like a pretty splinter in your soft flesh: her poems are sharp, urging your attention, lingering as a sweet ache that your body remembers even when the sliver is gone.”
– from the jurors of the Raymond Souster Award

Reviews:

“Defying one-dimensional stereotypes, Shi’s speaker is funny, stubborn, empathetic, opinionated, and – perhaps most excitingly – isn’t focused on justifying herself to a white neurotypical readership. Poems honour friends, ancestors, and other writers and artists, returning to themes of identity and history, found and lost family, disability and mad kinship, and ruptures and recombinations of languages and selfhoods. While struck through with grief, the collection reads as an ode to community and an incantation for interdependent survival.”
– Madelaine Caritas Longman, PRISM international