“I used trees to express desire, and I desired the language of trees.” In The Geometry of Trees, Zhou Sivan reflects and studies the diffraction of queer desire through tree trunks, bark textures in “Fauvist patters,” solitary oaks, and “buoyant botanical lakes.” Trees are political texts, moreover, simply by their geography, what they signify, the shade they claim, and the literary lives they have earned. Zhou’s poems observe how the properties and relations within trees change as they travel through the poet’s life. In the background, trees dramatize the architectural displays of empire, calling attention to the insidious presence of colonialism, and displaying in off-color the persistence of imperial hubris.

Zhou Sivan (pen name of Nicholas Y. H. Wong) is author of three chapbooks, Zero Copula (Delete Press, 2015), Sea Hypocrisy (co-published by DoubleCross Press and Projective Industries, 2016), and The Geometry of Trees (Sputnik & Fizzle, 2022). His poems and review essays have appeared in Almost Island, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Asymptote, Chicago Review, Counter, Full Stop Quarterly, Kisah Journal, and Lana Turner. From Malaysia, he has lived and worked in Singapore, the U.S. (Chicago and New York), and now teaches Chinese-English translation as Assistant Professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong.