First Contact

A formally experimental and absurdist mock-epic poem that melds speculative fiction and travel writing Something on the horizon inches toward the drunken villagers of Zonal Beach, but what—or who—could it be? In First Contact, Warren Liu presents a hilarious, polyphonic poem that narrates the agonizingly slow-motion progress of a first contact encounter between coastal natives and shipwrecked would-be colonizers. Liu's wry, humorous poetry uses three distinct voices to highlight the inherent farce of coming up against a world entirely different from one's own. Slipping between tropes of colonial myth-making and alien encounters, Liu animates the strange, slanted rhymes of history with a voracious wit and deft ear. Whether narrating the choral chatter of the bewildered villagers or a mystic's pop-culture-informed oracular visions or the epistolary reminiscences of a lost exile, Liu demonstrates again and again how colliding with a new culture always happens first as farce, then as farce once more. Warren Liu is a professor of English at Scripps College in Claremont, California.