Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
First Contact

First Contact

Liu, Warren

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $18.95

ISBN10: 193571726X
ISBN13: 9781935717263
Publisher: Kaya Press
Published: May 26 2026
Pages: 112
Weight: 0.50
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.30 Depth: 7.50
Language: English

A formally experimental and absurdist mock-epic poem that melds speculative fiction and travel writing

Something on the horizon inches toward the drunken villagers of Zonal Beach, but what--or who--could it be? In First Contact, Warren Liu presents a hilarious, polyphonic poem that narrates the agonizingly slow-motion progress of a first contact encounter between coastal natives and shipwrecked would-be colonizers. Liu's wry, humorous poetry uses three distinct voices to highlight the inherent farce of coming up against a world entirely different from one's own. Slipping between tropes of colonial myth-making and alien encounters, Liu animates the strange, slanted rhymes of history with a voracious wit and deft ear. Whether narrating the choral chatter of the bewildered villagers or a mystic's pop-culture-informed oracular visions or the epistolary reminiscences of a lost exile, Liu demonstrates again and again how colliding with a new culture always happens first as farce, then as farce once more.

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