TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT, the first perfect-bound edition of this exciting Bay Area poet’s work, features 48 poems titled TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT. In the Author’s Note, Meng explains that the poems inside “began as an experiment in repetition after reading biographies of both Neil Young and Glenn Gould.” “In this poem, the camera spectates on what to do with a darkness/ so overwrought the hand can’t steady it. The kind/ that furiously dwindles until it cancels its mouth/ & the tongue thumps grotesque & unhinged/ Unhinges each blad of grass, unhinges the pasture from the wire/ & fence posts that hold cattle from the road. Swiftly, swiftly,/ it unhinges both road & cattle. Where canyon was cut from rock/ by water, a wind moves, so the voice goes/ rising as darkness does, wildly undocumented./ The voice unhinges from the country it springs from–”–from TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT. Meng’s poems have appeared, among other places, in The Boston Review, Crowd, JUBILAT, FENCE, and Fulcrum.
