earned his MFA at the City University of Hong Kong and is the author of Cities of Sameness. He is a finalist of New Letters Poetry Award and a semi-finalist of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. He is on the editorial board of Drunken Boat and Mead: Magazine of Literature and Libations. Visit his website here.

Meeting Robert Olen Butler

" I am interested in indie films because of their unconventional way of storytelling. Similarly, to me, interesting poetry disrupts the linearity of a narrative, concerns how images and refreshing languages collide with one another. The craft of poetry writing also has a lot in common with the form of a film. For instance, when to cut, what follows afterward and how to control the rhythm in a long shot resemble effective line (or stanza) breaks, the use fragments and playing with the syntactical structure of a sentence.

" My poem is an afterthought after attending Butler’s talk on writing. I know the mysterious creative process has a lot to deal with the unconscious, which is somehow locked by logic. The analogy reminds me of Nolan’s Inception. I remember asking him if he can trespass, as a Pulitzer winner, the invisible boundary and enter ‘the zone’. He deliberates for a while, and says yes. "