As those close to me know, the end of last year and the beginning of this year have been very, very full for me. There’s this one Hemingway passage from The Sun Also Rises I’m disproportionately obsessed with (because I read it in high school and being fifteen tends to magnify and distort things), about how life happens in staccato bursts, and these last few months have certainly felt like one sustained explosion.

Back in November, I’d gone to my friend—and talented writer—K’s house on a weekday, where we kicked back and ate Thai takeout and I was complaining to her again, I think, about some boy. She asked me, And have you been writing? And I said, Not really, and she said, That’s fine, that’s good, it’s because you’ve been too busy living—and she was, as usual, right.

But then, suddenly, I was writing again. A lot. And had a bunch of publications! One thing followed another. I was reading a lot of poetry in the late fall, and I liked how some collections included endnotes. So, in the same spirit, I’ve gathered my thoughts on the things I was reading, watching, absorbing, and remembering when I wrote the pieces that came out this past winter. Somehow this post feels more like liner notes than anything else, but maybe I’m only saying that because I peaked as a teenager with music.

First, my essay about my relationship to exercise and my body and the young dads in China who taught me how to weight lift was published in Hobart Pulp. I worked on this essay for six years. I’m grateful it’s finally finished now and found a home in a publication I’ve long admired. I wrote the bulk of the final draft last spring in the Brooklyn Heights public library while going through what really was not a break up but felt like one. While writing it, I drew on many things, among them: this essay about four gyms by Vivian Hu, this short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, this short story by Yiyun Li, the classic old idea by Ray Oldenburg, this essay about public walking by Aminatta Forna, the tradition of flâneurism as distilled in English at one point by Edmund White, the extensive literature on running—including this stellar essay by my good friend Sheon, Lorde’s new album “Virgin,” Lorde’s old album “Melodrama,” and the time an older writer told me “endorphin” is a portmanteau of “endogenous” and “morphine.”

There is an old, old photo of me in my late teens or early twenties that might still exist somewhere. I’m curled up on a classroom floor, eating a banana, talking about endorphins. I even posted the photo to the internet. But contrary to the banana, I wasn’t really eating. When my friends took that picture of me, I hadn’t eaten in a long time. Last summer, I went on a date with a man who tried to explain Lorde’s “body dysmorphia thing” to me in a park. He called it that. I asked him if he wanted to be friends. He did not want to be friends.

It was also funny and bittersweet for me that this essay came out in the age of Chinamaxxing. In December, right before the essay went live, I watched Bi Gan’s Resurrection in theaters. I thought surely nobody will watch this long-ass Chinese art film during dinner hours on an early weekday—but I was wrong, because I live in New York. The theater was full and I sat on an odd but very comfy chair that was like a couch someone had pulled into the auditorium. Throughout the film, I kept worrying about what happens when you confront form as substance. By this I mean that Bi’s first film—and to an extent his second—uses dreams and surrealism as form, not as substantive content—which is what Resurrection does. But then I read Justin Chang’s review in The New Yorker and I was less up-in-arms.

I was remembering how, the year I lived in China—and worked out with the guys at the gym—the Chinese film industry had marketed Bi’s sophomore film Long Day’s Journey into Night as a romance (I think they released it on Valentine’s Day?!) and couples had flocked to the theaters only to discover a spooling, dark, arthouse feature instead.

The makeout scene at the end of Resurrection was excellent though. Looked like a really damn good makeout. It’s good to kiss someone when the world is ending around you.

Second, I wrote about an exhibit at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art in SoHo and the catalog accompanying it. The Leslie Lohman Museum, founded in 1987 in the wake of the Stonewall Riots, is the only museum in the world dedicated wholly to LGBTQ+ artists and artwork year-round. I wrote for Hyperallergic about the new exhibit on David Wojnarowicz’s “Arthur Rimbaud in New York” series in our age of growing authoritarianism and surveillance—about how masking takes on new significance today. I first encountered Wojnarowicz’s work in earnest during the pandemic when I was—like so many of us were—at our loneliest. I was taken by the breadth of his work, his versatility, how he employed language across visual forms, and how he never forgot the political dimensions to everything. The show was up at the museum until January 18, 2026. My talented curator friend Sarah sent me this write-up on the 2018 Whitney retrospective, and I spoke to curator Sergio Antonio Bessa (here’s another talk he gave on the show), and I returned to Olivia Laing’s coverage of Wojnarowicz and other outsider artists in her 2016 book The Lonely City.

Third, a bunch of my poems are now out in the world. In late November, I had three poems come out in the Sandy River Review, edited by students at the University of Maine at Farmington. You can start with “Grange Falls,” and then “God of Falling Fruit,” and then “February Light.” I wrote “February Light” this time last year, which I thought would be the coldest winter ever, and of course I was wrong. My friend Jessica printed out the poem and had it framed at her place. My friends are the best people ever.

In December, my poem “The Grand Bell” was selected as a highly commended piece in the Manchester Cathedral Poetry Competition. In January, I had three poems come out in the new Michigan City Review of Books—Michigan City, Indiana, by the way—and I’m very excited for what’s going on there. You can read those here. I started some of those poems a long time ago—as early as my early twenties. I remember reading some Sharon Olds at the time. I haven’t read Sharon Olds in a while. Maybe I’ll read some Sharon Olds soon.

In late January, my poem “Another Year, Another” appeared in Prosetrics magazine, which is currently only available in print. Also in late January, I had two poems come out with Dialogist. You can read “Laojia Wedding” and “Downtown” here. I think often about places I tried to call home and failed to do so; I think about Cambridge and Tangshan and several neighborhoods in Manhattan.

More poems and prose and rambling public diary thoughts soon. Until then!