Smart technology snuck up like an accident. I think I wasn’t ready to leave behind the intimacy that happens around a television. The end of an era happens without a warning, and suddenly the way we inhabit not only public but even the most domestic spaces, have changed.

Love Speech is an auto-theoretical book that reads both like poetry and an epistle; a textile of literary mothers shot through with cultural-political feelings, threads of conversation, and moments from queer life. Love Speech takes it titles from an ethics of addressability that Judith Butler originally raises to examine what makes language such as hate speech hurtful. “Our very being exposes us to the address of another,” she says (via Claudia Rankine’s account in Citizen: An American Lyric.) Butler considers the inverse in several conversations, and Huang, too, is more devoted to theorizing and enacting love speech further.

Xiao Xuan / Sherry Huang is a writer whose poetics emerges and expands through music, ephemera, and printed matter. She conceptualizes poetics as that which embraces indeterminacies in language and phenomenology. Her first full-length publication, Love Speech, (Metatron Press 2019,) is an intersection between poetry and epistolary auto-theory. Across her body of work, she is interested in: love / queer diachronic time / lyric fragments / epistolary address / oblique reading / & écriture féminine. She is a poetry M.F.A. candidate in the Faculty of Creative and Critical studies, University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus.) She is an immigrant-settler to Canada, alternately based out of Shanghai and the Syilx Okanagan land known as Kelowna.

POETRY

84 pages

ISBN |  978-1-988355-17-7

Fall | 2019

Blurbs

“Tender and strong, Love Speech weaves together citations of queer poetry and theory with terse revelations of how contemporary conditions of work impact our experience of love. Huang posits possibilities for joy and for survival not in a distant utopia, but locating them somewhere closer to here and now."

- Kaitlin Chan, founder of Queer Reads Library

Press

The Cascade | "Love Speech is an intimate and philosophical reflection on the manifestation of love in the life of a queer immigrant-settler. Huang carefully balances poetry and academia in this auto-theoretical piece that has earned its place amongst academic circles focused on gender studies and philosophy."

The Link | "Like reading the diary of your smartest friend."