APOLOGY ENGINE

ISBN: 978-1-938900-41-9
Publication date: Spring 2022
34 pages, 5.3” x 7”
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SYNOPSIS

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.

EXCERPT

We can apologize directly to poems for so much, but they rarely apologize back to us. Some of the poems I love most are horrifying to me. Please tell me, for the love of god, why is the peignoir so complacent? I beg the poems for closure and tell them how much they’re hurting me. I buy daffodils and chocolate at the grocery store, leave them at the poems’ doorsteps. But the gesture is never reciprocated. While every poem has the potential to make an apology, like people, most of them are actually so busy apologizing to themselves that you’d need to practice a rare patience. Choosing to forgive oneself removes the distance between the ideal self and the real self. The poem’s ideal self eats mostly quinoa, alternates between cardio and free-weights three days a week. The poem’s real self looks in the mirror and tries not to see you in the reflection. Who is going to speak first.

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

Author of IMAGINE US, THE SWARM

AUTHOR

Cameron Quan Louie lives in Tucson, AZ. A graduate of the University of Washington’s MFA program, he has also been a Multiplying Mediums Fellow, winner of the 2017 McLeod-Grobe Prize for Poetry, and 2019 grant recipient from the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Souther Arizona for his poetry and photgraphy series, Domestic. His poems, essays, and erasures appear or are forthcoming in jubilat, The Rumpus, Entropy, Quarterly West, Best New Poets, Asian American Writers Workshop, Sonora Review, Salt Hill, Wendy’s Subway, The Spectacle, Hobart, The Gravity of the Thing, Pacifica Literary Review, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere.

DESIGNER

Book design by Sandra Rosales.