STRUCTURES FROM THE STILL is an imperative to recall and forge an internal landscape bound by kites, transmission towers, and the shifting sky — where seemingly unrelated subjects become the very acts of narrative and perception.

STRUCTURES FROM THE STILL is a book infused with the joy of discovering the possibilities of language, of imagination and of being human. As its final poem fades out – it literally fades into the page – I find myself recalling, from the poem “Letter to the Unsaid,” these lines: “I want to wake up and never/ let the sleep go/”

— Nathan Spoon, author of Doomsday Bunker (Swan World, 2017)

Cheung invites us to slow down, to look, and to contemplate the cadences and forms of the world around us as well as the workings of the lyrical mind within it. His work takes us to a place at once familiar and mysterious, one in which “we are twilight anytime,” and the poet can “ask the sky why it frowns upon/ the clouds.” This is verse that weaves with threads laid out by Charles Olson, “in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressures of his breath.” In this collection, moments of celebration - the “happiness on/ the outskirts of/ overgrown planets” - mingle with those of more melancholic introspection and reflection. What arises is a singular voice, an ear, a set of eyes that are tuned to both the discordant cacophony and the luminous harmonies that surround us: a mind that wants to “wake up/ and never let the sleep go.”

— Mark Gurarie, author of Everybody’s Automat (The Operating System, 2016)