Shanxing Wang - From this personal experience, Wang has created a work of art-in-language which breaks new territories of poetic form. The central urgency of Wang's work is a fractured personal and ideological loss

Shanxing Wang, Mad Science in Imperial City. Futurepoem Books, 2005.

"MAD SCIENCE IN IMPERIAL CITY is propelled by the personal loss and trauma Shanxing Wang experienced during the political turbulence of the 1980s which culminated in the 1989 tragedy at Tiananmen Square. From this personal experience, Wang has created a work of art-in-language which breaks new territories of poetic form. The central urgency of Wang's work is a fractured personal and ideological loss; mirroring this, the work manufactures its own form on the page as a broken narrative. Like Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Wang's work materializes the shattered effects of cultural history on the mind of the poet who is trying to piece his life together in its devastating and unresolved wake."—Kristin Prevallet

Shanxing Wang’s debut collection, Mad Science in Imperial City, is an exploration of how bearing witness is “burdened by the solidification and densification of its own memory and the difficulty of telling it faithfully.” An extraordinary work of collapsed geography and conflated event, it argues that only through engaging with tradition can we understand our experience of the world as it changes around us.
Four linked sections of poetic prose that draw both from the lyric and the novelistic, Mad Science resists classification. It utilizes scientific diagrams, mathematical equations, lists, and even a menu from an imagined Poetry Auction (“poetry of fresh masquerade, $6.75”). Broadly, it relates the experience of someone who left China after the Tiananmen Square massacre to settle in the U.S., carrying the fourth edition of the American Heritage dictionary “wherever I go.” The book uses this emigration to investigate what constitutes the individual and where narration resides. - Lytton Smith

from Mad Science in Imperial City:
there is no point I see no point in further interpretation I smell the last lily of june I usher my lady of flower into my secret glass garden of budding black mushroom I feel an itching in the back of my knees spreading horizontally backwards and vertically downwards at the same time I don't want to go let me go

An interview with Shanxing Wang

Shanxing Wang: Probes of Near-Field Optical Microscopy +
From A’s Degeneracy  in The Brooklyn Rail