After spending so many months writing and rewriting, I felt like I had exhausted every original idea I would ever have. The pressure to continually reinvent myself as a writer was paralysing. Revisiting that old draft and finding that one image was like reaching into a coat pocket on the first day of winter and pulling out a $20 bill. I wanted to replicate its freshness and excitement. It was adapted from a real scene: my own grandmother in the kitchen during the Lunar New Year celebration, hovering above several steaming pots. What else is in the frame?

The poem to me is perpetually fraught and shot through with seams of unfinished bewilderment. This is perhaps why, as multilingual poet, I find the poem as such a fertile and natural space to traverse the incommensurable distances between languages and cultures. I have an entrustment, that in the poem, the untranslatable, liminal collisions between languages are not failures, but unaccountable—and therefore inexhaustibly mysterious—enunciations in their own right, serving as generative reconfigurations of legibility, intelligibility, and sense-making.