Nancy Chen Long is the author of Wider than the Sky (Diode Editions, 2020), which was selected for the Diode Editions Book Award, and Light into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017), which won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. Her work has been supported by a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing fellowship and a Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award. You'll find her recent poems in Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She works at Indiana University in the Research Technologies division.

Other poems by Nancy Chen Long in Verse Daily:
October 1, 2020:   "Confession" "We who go empty-clad..."

Books by Nancy Chen Long:

Other poems on the web by Nancy Chen Long:
"Lapidary"
"Chiaroscuro"
"Eight Ways of Looking at a Man-Kite"
"why There is No Interest in Singing"

Nancy Chen Long's Website.

Nancy Chen Long on Twitter.

About Wider than the Sky:

"Reading Wider than the Sky is to encounter a world and a sensibility. With each poem firing as precisely as a synapse, interwoven into one shimmering neural net, Nancy Chen Long's collection is a richly varied, acutely embodied exploration of how 'our life is what our thoughts make it.' Eidetic moments, as vivid as the 'star-nosed mole, / its many-fingered nose —a fan of proboscises' ground these poems where a child, finding a perfume bottle that once belonged to her grandmother, is 'Suddenly...eating fruit in my memory, faint yellow slivers of stars, / juice running through my fingers.' The universality and specificity of human experience is profoundly felt in these metaphysical poems, interrogating and celebrating how being persists, 'forever/home, forever foreign,' despite subjective and collective erasure —its aberrations, its genetic inheritances, its 'scorched language,'— 'creating/ourselves as we go.'"
—Rebecca Seiferle

"Empathic polymath Nancy Chen Long considers wide-ranging topics—from neurology to Emily Dickinson, from the big bang to Bible stories—as she interrogates the role of memory in the formation of our narratives and of our selves. Long portrays fleeting scenes from childhood onward—scenes which momentarily shine a flickering light on life's big topics: the links between story and belief, forgiveness and biology, society and violence, language and loss. The reader experiences this unforgettable book in the same way a memory is experienced—as incomplete images infused with emotional wholeness, images that swell and recede and leave us changed for having been momentarily immersed in the intimacy between past and present that we call memory."
—Jessica Goodfellow