words toward Tim Tim Cheng’s ‘The Tattoo Collector’ (Nine Arches Press, 2024)

The Tattoo Collector
poems
Tim Tim Cheng
Nine Arches Press, 2024

Of generous absences and identity bestowals, Tim Tim Cheng’s liberating and grounded signage as etched in The Tattoo Collector is an undertaking of invisible kindness that takes care to hold capture as a thing departing. This is inquiry of the vividly extraneous sort, and lovely for how it hears hurt and for how its listener replays its resurrections as a deejay mining beats from the dead a-side of ideas. And it is loved. For the maybe of its perhaps-esque whisper that tells a secret secret to a secret that speaks speech to power. For its rescued misunderstandings and trapped immunizations. For its situational distractions and near afield obsessions. One can’t control a birthmark. Somewhere a reddish prayerful river is slowing to transfer a blank apple into the least wild dream of a godsick bird. Be early to this skinwork. Track this verse. 

~

reflection by Barton Smock

* Check out Tim Tim Cheng reading from the work for the 'I Think I Can't Speak For Everyone Here' reading series HERE