Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun

An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood

by Jackie Wang

$17.95 Paperback

408 pp., 5 x 8 in, 20 b&w illus.

Paperback
9781635901924
Published: November 21, 2023
Publisher: Semiotext(e)

$17.95

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The early writings of renowned poet and critical theorist Jackie Wang, drawn from her early zines, indie-lit crit, and prolific early 2000s blog.

Compiled as a field guide, travelogue, essay collection, and weather report, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun traces Jackie Wang's trajectory from hard femme to Harvard, from dumpster dives and highway bike rides to dropping out of an MFA program, becoming a National Book Award finalist, and writing her trenchant book Carceral Capitalism. Alien Daughters charts the dream-seeking misadventures of an “odd girl” from Florida who emerged from punk houses and early Tumblr to become the powerful writer she is today. Anarchic and beautifully personal, Alien Daughters is a strange intellectual autobiography that demonstrates Wang's singular self-education: an early life lived where every day and every written word began like the Tarot's Fool, with a leap of faith.

Jackie Wang is a poet, scholar, multimedia artist, and Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (2021), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; the critical essay collection Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018); and the chapbooks The Twitter Hive Mind Is Dreaming (2018) and Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb (2016). Her research is on racial capitalism, surveillance technology, and the political economy of prisons and police.

Jackie Wang is dissolute. She refuses the word "work" so her writing is full of location and devoid of it, continuing I guess what was really ripe in the '70s about what a sentence is and what "my" mind is doing today. It's not all lost territory but Alien Daughters, most of all, is just profoundly beautiful, hellish new writing. I feel fucking lucky to have this suitcase of Jackie's, these pets of hers, deflating and surging, bobbing & rocking here right now. Something glorious. What can it be?
Eileen Myles

Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun is a patchwork epic of feral girlhood, faithful to the subterranean dignity of its materials—dreams, zines, and Tumblr posts. Jackie Wang has written a book I've been waiting my whole life to read.
Anne Boyer

Wang is her own unique force. I'm dazzled by her brilliant mind, capacious imagination, and where she takes us, her startling lines carrying the shock of recognition.
Shelley Wong, Poetry Society of America

Absolutely personal, like a plant or a dream, Jackie's handbook of how to live backwards tumbles through the tumult of a dying and resurrecting world. Jackie appears in these pages as a playful high-priestess spider holding together the weave of a web that leads to the punk house and the prison and the university library and the inner world and the underworld and so on. This writing is very alive as in decomposing into the cosmos. To quote her: “the gift of the word has been given to women who are not afraid of the rapture of turning themselves inside out.
Hannah Black

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Semiotext(e) / Native Agents

Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun

An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood

Semiotext(e) / Native Agents

Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun

An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood

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