ISBN 9781733408233

Christine Shan Shan Hou’s The Joy and Terror are Both in the Swallowing offers a new mythology for our “smooth and violent era.”

Together, these poems map a constellation of desire, addressing “the female pleasure gap,” the exhilaration of submission, and all the mundanity and peculiarities of planetary life. Hou asserts that “you cannot rely on algorithms to take you to your destination,” instead arduously pushing past habits, expectations, instincts, and other “nameless forces,” toward the singular spark of enlightenment. 

In these fable-like poems, readers traverse landscapes both foreign and familiar. The result is a peregrination towards an afterlife “opaque & without backstory,” where tame animals return to the wild and nature forgives us for our failures. 

Christine Shan Shan Hou is a non-binary poet and visual artist. Publications include The Joy and Terror are Both in the Swallowing (After Hours Editions 2021) Community Garden for Lonely Girls (Gramma Poetry 2017),“I'm Sunlight” (The Song Cave 2016), C O N C R E T E S O U N D (2011) a collaborative artists’ book with Audra Wolowiec, and Accumulations (Publication Studio, Jank Editions 2010) featuring drawings by Hannah Rawe. Their poems and artwork have been featured in numerous journals and anthologies. They have received awards from The Key West Literary Seminar, The Flow Chart Foundation/Academy for American Poets, and Naropa University.

"Between joy and terror, Christine Shan Shan Hou's brilliant poetic ecology transports a reader to ancient and future horizons with humorous and grave pan-animism that generously includes our dicey species. Moving glimpses of what it means to be a woman (sexual object, mother . . .) here, now, and in between release intermittent cascades of hilariously juxtaposed first person facts, pragmatic advice, wacky wisdom, delightful fables, eerie fairy-tale realism, and ‘Lost Haikus.’ Reading this book, so dynamically fueled by intellectual curiosity and deeply felt empathy is enlivening. Consider the vulnerable wit of the penultimate poem's final line: ‘It will be a miracle that I survive’—the gloriously vulnerable optimism in that that that is not an if."
—Joan Retallack, author of BOSCH'D and The Poethical Wager

“In this explosively frontal collection, Christine Shan Shan Hou's scope traverses diverse terrains: from the female body in domestic situations to landscapes with predators and megafauna—to even the wilds of the afterlife, where ‘everyone lives in a hotel.’ These leaping, elliptical poems are darkly funny and full of pluck and verve. The speakers of these poems keeps one eye on the terrarium of contemporary life while keeping the other eye on watch for blink-and-you'll-miss-it death. Here is a hero expressive of desires absurd yet essential: ‘I want my death to be comfortable and homey, but also victorious and sexy like a pack of half-naked men riding wild animals.’ Throughout, Hou's bold lyric gives way to sections of ‘The Lost Haikus,’ haikus which dot the white pages like small ponds in which we bear witness to transcendent auguries. ‘Clarity,’ Hou writes, ‘is a moment of madness unravelling in real time in a public space,’ much like these poems tracing the ‘obedient’ geography of a life caught between the urban and the unknown—I joyfully rode along, as if on my own feral creature.”
—Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Ghost Of

“Reading Christine Shan Shan Hou's The Joy and Terror Are Both in the Swallowing, I was reminded of Hildegard's edict that if one wanted to be clever, they should put a sapphire in their mouth. I would stuff myself full of gemstones if it would make me even a bit as clever as Hou. These poems are warming and restorative, even when sharp. I am thankful for them.”
—Jessa Crispin, author of The Dead Ladies Project