Fred Wah is a writer of the contemporary, not the archive. He writes poetry “as a way of reading and thinking” (Faking It 1). I read his poetry as a way of thinking and writing. My focus therefore is on “the archive effect” ...

When literary critics approach highly experimental works, we are confronted with a problem: it is not clear to us what the work means. Readers of such work often find themselves bereft. We don’t know what to do when we ...