"To be unable to speak, to be shy, to be quiet, to be reticent, is not to be silent, or silenced--not if one listens carefully to the state of reclusion, as carefully as Jennifer S. Cheng does in her beautiful essay, in which she invokes not only the resonance of such a state, but reminds us, too, that the vocation of writing--always--is a call from within. It is a call she has clearly heard." --Mary Ruefle "In her concise, precise and beautifully rendered INVOCATION, Cheng's 'utterances' are urgent and even, at times, defiant. She puzzles out existence, investigates silence. The intersection...

House A investigates the tones and textures of immigrant home-building by asking: How is the body inscribed with a cosmology of home, and vice versa? With evocative and intellectual precision, House A weaves personal, discursive, and lyrical textures to invoke the immersive-obscured experience of an immigrant home's entanglement while mapping a new poetics of American Home, steeped in longing and rooted by displacement.