Kaya Press and KSW Present Between the Ropes: a poetry reading

This event has a limited number of in-person tickets available and will be simulcast to Zoom.

"You know your life is fucked when you’re on better terms with the person you just knocked out than you are with anyone who loves you."

Excerpt from Muscle Memory by JENNY LIOU

On December 5th Kaya Press and KSW are celebrating the release of Muscle Memory by poet, professor, and former MMA fighter, Jenny Liou! Joining Jenny on this special night will be poets, Karen Llagas, Michelle Penaloza, and Truong Tran! (in-person and Zoom)

About the Book

In Muscle Memory, Washington-based poet Jenny Liou grapples with violence and identity, beginning with the chain-link enclosure of the prizefighter’s cage and radiating outward into the diasporic sweep of Chinese American history. Liou writes with spare, stunning lyricism about how cage fighting offered relief from the trauma inflicted by diaspora’s vanishing ghosts; how, in the cage, an elbow splits an eyebrow, or an armbar snaps a limb, and even when you lose a fight, you’ve won something else: pain. Liou places the physical manifestation of violence in her sport alongside the deeper traumas of immigration and her own complicated search for identity, exploring what she inherited from her Chinese immigrant father—who was also obsessed with poetry and martial arts. When she finally steps away from the cage to raise children of her own, Liou begins to question how violence and history pass from one generation to the next, and whether healing is possible without forgetting.

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