Yaniya Lee reflects on Jackie Wang and a life of poetry.

Everyone has a story about the first Jackie Wang thing they ever read, and how that writing changed them. She smashes ideas and experiences together in an effervescent way. She has this ability to change your life. It’s her writing, but it’s also her, just the way she is. For me, it was after years of following her blog “Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns,” that I found her essay “Against Innocence,” republished in a pamphlet as part of Semiotext(e)’s contribution to the 2014 Whitney Biennial. I was a black girl raised by activist lesbians. I’d been reading zines and fiction and theory since I was a kid but it was this essay that introduced me to Black Studies, to Frank Wilderson and Afropessimism. I learned that black subjectivity (our ontology) was a subject of debate within academia. Now, nearly a decade later, I’m a student of Black Studies and the Black Radical Tradition. And though I might have arrived here on my own eventually, Jackie Wang’s writing was my first point of entry. Her writing was a shortcut to a new world.

Everyone has a story about the first time they met Jackie Wang. For me, it was after I signed up to a workshop she was leading, in a city six hours away from where I lived. Sure, I was a fangirl. But if you’ve ever read her, you ended up loving her.

Image: Jackie Wang with the author in Cambridge, 2018. Courtesy of Yaniya Lee.

It is hard to make a distinction between Jackie and her writing. Her writing moves through the world in the same way she does—with openness and honesty and bravery. Over time, she’s gone from zines to blogs to books, and always retained an immediacy that feels permissive. It is permissive because in her dedication to rigour in her research, her expansive curiosity, and relentless self-examination, she makes you feel like (1) you’re not alone, (2) it’s ok to be strange, and (3) difficult ideas and feelings don’t have to be scary. When you read her, you feel like you’re old friends having a conversation, and in that intimacy, she’s sharing something personal and difficult, or synthesising a hard thing she learned and wants you to understand.

Semiotext(e) published her book Carceral Capitalism, a series of essays on racial capitalism, predatory lending, and parasitic government, in 2010. (She wrote the entire book on cue cards, and when she struggled to make time to finish it, she booked herself an all-inclusive cruise and treated it like an emergency residency.) Her 2021 book of poetry The Sunflower was published by Nightboat Books and nominated for a National Book Award. Her latest book, Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun, published in 2023 by Semiotext(e), collects ten years of writing from blog posts and zines published between 2006–16.

Image: Cover of Jackie Wang’s Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun. Courtesy of Semiotext(e).

At the core of Jackie’s work is a “desire to expand our notion of reality, and to create space for the existence of parallel realities,” she once wrote in an essay on Refbatch, the artist whose work she named her blog after. She achieves this through a constant imbrication of different modes of writing. She is a serious poet, a serious scholar, and a serious blogger. Before writing this I reach out to Jackie to see if she has time for a quick chat. She writes back right away and we schedule a WhatsApp call for a few days later. She tells me she’s always been “interested in theory written in a poetic register that takes seriously life as material for theorising.” In all modes, she expands reality: “I think about garments I cannot take off. The skincloth. And my burning desire to rearrange space so that we may be received differently, so that we can move through space without fear.”¹

What I’ve learned from the poets in my life is that poetry is not merely what ends up on the page, it’s about how you live. (“Writing saved me,” Jackie wrote. “I have been saved by the practice of assembling words.”²) The foundation of a poet’s writing is how they are in the world, and who they stand with, and the choices they make. Jackie’s mobility is a part of her magic. She travels a lot. And through this movement she nourishes her connection with people.

Jackie got into Black Studies because she was interested in the history of mass incarceration and also the Black Radical Tradition. (As a teenager she saw her brother incarcerated and sentenced to life without parole.) She wrote zines, read widely, and joined radical reading groups. She tells me her undergraduate thesis, about race, gender, and the practice of writing, “really planted the seeds of a lot of interests that I would track over the years. I don’t think I’ve ever really left that project behind. I continue to be invested in writing that is interdisciplinary or that unapologetically rejects the terms of academic writing.”

“To me it’s all connected. I did a lecture series at Brandeis recently that was ocean-themed. So I was reading just a lot of pop science books about the ocean, in addition to more theoretical writing. Whether it’s Alexis Pauline Gumbs, or Édouard Glissant, or Gaston Bachelard. And to me, it’s all connected. I strongly relate to Fred Moton’s lack of epistemological filters in terms of guiding his reading life,” she says.

Jackie’s interdisciplinarity allows for new possibilities. “I like to constellate disparate things,” she says. “Hybrid work, to me, is always what I’ve been interested in doing, and figuring out what kind of writing is demanded by the questions that I’m exploring,” she continues. “So even in Carceral Capitalism, a work of dense theory and political economy, I still have these lyrical interludes where I write autobiographically about my brother’s incarceration….When I got to the end, it really felt like the conclusion needed to be engaged with poetry as a mode of thinking that doesn’t capitulate to the realism of the present, [poetry] as a way to think about the project of prison abolition.”

Image: Jackie Wang in LA, 2022. Courtesy of Yaniya Lee.

Writing, like research, is immersive for her. She’s developed strategies to lose herself completely in the writing. She aims for “lyrical theorising,” along a path set by Trinh T. Minh-ha, bell hooks, Hélène Cixous, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, among others. “There’s an experience of a diffuse attention, an immersion or going under, where there’s a sense of maybe ego loss, where you’re just in this flow state,” she says of her approach. “And then you’re just writing in that musical register, which is why sometimes the writing can toggle between prose and verse, but it really is about the states you’re entering into. So it is a very physical and bodily experience. And that is always why I like to write. I just like the experience of writing.”

Looking over her body of work, a rhythm becomes evident. All her writing is in some way a careful examination of self and society through conjunction. Conjunction of ideas, of experiences, of forms. The praxis is never static. She is propelled by curiosity. Ultimately, Jackie writes because she loves to write. “Most of the writing I do is non-public,” she says. She writes for the act of writing itself.

Whatever comes next will be another interdisciplinary accumulation. “I just collect. I’m almost like a squirrel collecting nuts. I collect these little nuggets of quotes, inspiration, ideas. And then there’s usually a five-to-ten year lag from the start point to when I realise that I’m working on something. So I will just be writing, collecting, and then five-to-ten years later, I’m like, ‘Oh, maybe this could be a book project.’”

The last time I saw Jackie was a couple years ago in LA, where she had just started a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. I had spent the day on the beach in Malibu and my friends dropped me off at Jackie’s place on their way home. We sipped tea and caught up. We shared our visions of a writing life. I described a farmhouse in the French countryside and she countered with an Italian casa near the sea. Somehow we continue to be aspirational. As writers and thinkers and researchers, the work always seems to get done, and what we tweak and revise is the world we build around writing.

Yaniya Lee is the author of Selected Writing on Black Canadian Art (2024), and Buseje Bailey: Reasons Why We Have to Disappear Every Once in a While, A Black Art History Project (2024). Lee has taught or written about art for universities, museums, and arts institutions across North America and Europe, including Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, de Appel Amsterdam, Dutch Art Institute, Toronto Biennial of Art, Art in America, British Vogue, Canadian Art, The Fader, Flash Art, Montez Press, and T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

Banner image: Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash.

Notes

^{1. Jackie Wang, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2023), 153.}

^{2. Ibid, 229.}