Cameron Quan Louie is the author of Apology Engine, a chapbook forthcoming from Gold Line Press. Three of Cameron’s poems appeared in The Gravity of the Thing’s Summer 2017 issue, Cameron’s multimedia erasure poetry appeared in The Gravity of the Thing’s Fall 2017 issue, and Cameron’s poetry will also appear in The Gravity of the Thing’s upcoming Stranged Writing anthology.
About Apology Engine:
Moving between ever-proliferating expressions of public and private remorse, Cameron Quan Louie’s Apology Engine explores moral responsibility, memory, and identity through the fragile, spiraling machinery of the prose poem. Apologies to pets, family members, nations, dissected squids, and famous songs form the circuitry of a collection that asks us to reconsider gendered symbols and aesthetic approaches, as it examines how personal and cultural apologies are interconnected, how they can become tools of control, how they can lose their power to heal, and why we might need to continue making them anyway.
What apologies need to be made these days? Who needs to make the apologies, and what happens once they do? Apology Engine works its way into the gears of these questions, breaking them apart in the search for an elusive answer.
Advance praise:
“‘Who apologizes to whom?’ is the presiding question of Cameron Quan Louie’s Apology Engine, a smart and poignant collection of prose poems that expertly toe the line between gallows humor and a series of sincere apologies in the making. Just as an engine is powered by the assemblage of its parts, Louie’s plunge into the world of apologies takes us from the author’s guilt over dissecting a squid for a school assignment to the apology that would never arrive from the white man positioning himself as an expert on the author’s Chinese background. Each instance of sorry builds into a seemingly unstoppable motion through which no amount of apology would ever be replete. The only solution, Louie weighs, seems to be to pull the engine apart, to let the vehicle break down. What imperfect lessons will we learn then? As for me, I love being so thoroughly schooled by this clever and innovative collection, which reminds me that yes, sometimes repair means we have to first fall apart.”
—Muriel Leung, Imagine Us, the Swarm