In the Emily Books original publication The Selected Jenny Zhang, we’re delighted to be offering the first collection of Jenny Zhang’s work in ebook format, including some work no longer available in print. This collection features the chapbooks previously published as Dear Jenny, We Are All Find and HAGS as well as the essay “How It Feels.”
When asked how she fell for Jenny Zhang’s work, Ruth said, “Because she’s not afraid to be gross. You get the feeling that she loves being gross. She puts the grossness in service of something powerful.”
That grossness, and that power, provides the essential heartbeat of all Zhang’s work, both prose and poetry. In her work, she describes everything from sloppy sex and menstruation to a depression so intense she shat herself rather than get out of bed.
This visceral bodily descriptiveness is never deployed simply for shock value, though: by articulating the taboo, Zhang has carved space within literature for the brutal honesty of postmodern girlhood. In many instances, she does this by calling out her readers’ preconceived notions of who she is and what she is writing about.
This title was an Emily Books original and is no longer in print.
Jenny Zhang is an American writer and poet based in Brooklyn, New York. She has two published collections of poetry, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find and HAGS. Zhang was born in Shanghai.
"Poetry was an attempt to dig into the buried stuff inside a person’s psyche. It used dream logic instead of the logic of our waking lives. Poems were sputtered by demons not sprung out of morality. In other words, poems were deep shit."
– Jenny Zhang, “How It Feels”
