Lam, Kien

Kien Lam is a poet and Kundiman fellow whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, The Nation, and other publications. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he writes about e-sports. Extinction Theory (University of Georgia Press) is a collection of pseudoscience poems – and as much about language as it is about the absence of language – with which Lam tries to provide rationales for some of life’s most salient mysteries. Where is God? What does it mean to belong? Who killed the dinosaurs? Lam creates new worlds with new rules to better answer these perennial questions. His poetry is that of discovery, of looking at the world as if for the first time. He exposes the transitory and transcendent nature of things and how we find meaning. At the heart of this collection, there is also a catalog of smaller “extinctions.” Every passing moment is the death of something, and try as we might to recreate the feeling, it can never be the same. Maybe it’s a relationship, maybe it’s a doughnut.