Horny and serene, embodied and restless, Christine Shan Shan Hou's A Promise contains multitudes. These poems at times get carved apart, or folded over in impossible, reflexive yoga, or turned animal, vegetal, feral; all throughout, though, the reader can trust Hou to be a sure-handed guide of their metaphysical and physical puberties. "There is an entire fist growing / inside of you", writes Hou, and suddenly I can feel it. This book is at the brink, in all senses, and I loved it. —NIINA POLLARI

Christine Shan Shan Hou’s collection pulses with raw, unbridled desire—a visceral playground where the carnal essence of human form is etched in poetic strokes of fervor and awe. This arresting work dives into the primal raves of biology, where sinew and synapse entwine, and desire—along with its aching void—is charted and limned like a living, breathing organism. Each poem is a testament to the forces that animate us: muscle and marrow, breath and heartbeat, the electric spark of touch and the magnetic pull of connection. Christine’s artistry doesn’t just sit pretty; it grabs your senses by the collar and drags them into the unruly jungles of body and mind. Geometric precision collides with organic chaos, sparking a caffeinated tango of flesh and feeling that’s as vivid as it is visceral. A PROMISE is an excavation of what it means to be alive: to crave, to yearn, and to exist in a state of perpetual “What even is this feeling?!” Get ready to laugh, squirm, and maybe blush—a little or a lot. —VI KHI NAO

Dear Reader, allow me a moment to tell you how much I love the book you’re holding in your hands. From the first poem I was seized by a feeling of immediate excitement: a quickening of the nerves, an electric surge through the mind, and an amplified sense of being and possibility—in other words, the unique experience that only real poetry offers. To enumerate some of the oddities and splendors that exist side by side in these poems—a giraffe from Constantinople, the Lamb of God grazing in forbidden meadows, a cult of conifers, an inn made entirely of hands, schizophrenic lily-pads—might mislead you into thinking this book is all play. But there is also serious business here. In Christine Shan Shan Hou’s wild catalogs (reminiscent of Andre Breton and Benjamin Péret and Maria Sabina), the physical world becomes correlative to the weird and splendid inner world of feeling, being, sexual desire, consciousness, and spirit. A celebration of the profoundly contradictory complex of forces that comprise the human, A Promise is essential reading for poets and lovers of poetry—and for all of us who love living in this mysterious world. —GEOFFREY NUTTER

The precision of each line in Christine Shan Shan Hou’s stunning A Promise, is piercing. These poems hold the surreal and the concrete in deft embrace. Indeed, the erotic exposes an outrageousness of a body scouring the vast planes of this world—these poems move; a dance of flora, fauna. “Breasts and eggs can spend whole lifetimes in the sky and never fall,” Shan Shan Hou writes. And, “What if we flung our gorgeous bodies / Against the terrarium walls / With such gale force it shook the birds?” However roaming, these poems are also still, finding stages in which to display wild combinations of objects like a Joseph Cornel box, each poem a careful craftmanship of a cabinet of curiosities. A Promise, is a book about being a certain kind of human, one with all her unacceptable, pleasurable, rage and curiosity at work. These are poems about being held in form in the world, but also dissolving the divide between things; a human body, loosing its heart-pounding resolve upon the page. —BIANCA STONE