collier nogues

SHOPPETTE is a manuscript-in-progress of interactive lyric essays, photography, and poems. I named it after the 24-hour convenience stores common on overseas US military bases. The book explores the peculiar militarized suburbia exported around the world by American armed forces, and the ecological, economic, and social consequences for the people living on- and off-base. Here’s an excerpt.

In collaboration with poets Jhave Johnston and Mei Kwan Ng and programmer Leoson Cheong, I developed a bilingual Cantonese/English digital poetry installation for the City University of Hong Kong School of Creative Media's immersive 360º theater. CURVED interrogates Hong Kong’s Basic Law in the wake of 2014’s Umbrella Movement. My contributions drew on classical Chinese poetry and rearrangements of the Basic Law’s language, and foregrounded collaborative work produced by students in the writing workshops I led as Writer-in-Residence at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University. The project launched in June 2016. In July 2020, the literary journal TIMBER published a feature on CURVED. I’ve included here a one-minute montage of the June 2016 version, as well as two early tests for the project: a "tunnel" of Chinese characters, and an erasure of Hong Kong's Basic Law in both English and Chinese.

My article on co-creating graphic fiction and poetry with Gen AI, co-authored with Jack Tsao at HKU’s Common Core, came out in February 2024 at Poetics. Find it here.

My article about queer futurity, militarism, and CAConrad came out in January in Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture. The paper argues that CAConrad’s provocative, alliance-oriented experiments both in print poetry and in public performance critically distinguish queer appearance from queer visibility, with the aim of not only ‘dreaming,’ in José Muñoz’s terms, but also ‘enacting’ better possible futures in common with the world’s living and nonliving others.

Another article is available online at the open-access journal Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures. That paper discusses how Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez invites new stakeholders to join Guåhan’s (Guam’s) sovereignty and demilitarization movements via his mode of “oceania composition” and strategic use of social media.

Both papers are adapted from my dissertation, “Imagining Otherwise: Experimental US Antiwar Poetry in the 21st Century,” written while I was a Hong Kong PhD Fellow at the University of Hong Kong's School of English. In it, I trace the emergence of a vital American political poetry that adopts a perspective outside of the national frame. Examining recent works by Perez, CAConrad, and Don Mee Choi, I show how these poets’ formal experiments map collective responses to the collective precarities of neocolonialism, ecological crisis, neoliberal capitalism, and racial and homophobic injustice, charting new possibilities for the lyric and for political and poetic agency in the face of the increasingly militarized crises of the 21st century.

Recently I’ve been writing interactive poems using Twine, the nonlinear storytelling app, and A-frame, an immersive VR web framework, as compositional tools. One Twine poem, “History Is Knowing,” and two immersive poems, “Fleet Arcade” and “Whitehead,” appear in Tupelo Quarterly’s December 2022 issue. Others are forthcoming in Rabbit: A Journal for Nonfiction Poetry.

TWINE
“History is Knowing” builds on a quote by my DOKYU collaborator, the poet and essayist Lawrence Lacambra Ypil. Depending on which highlighted words you select, in which order, the poem’s sections unfold differently.

A-FRAME
“Fleet Arcade” and “Whitehead” are part of a series of immersive poems I’m developing as part of a Hong Kong Research Grants Council Early Career Scheme grant called “(Hemi)spherical Poetry: Connecting Transpacific Histories through Creative Research.” Poems from the project are set inside panoramic photographs of sites in Okinawa, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Guåhan, and the United States. To navigate inside a poem’s 360˚ environment on a PC, use your keyboard arrows and trackpad or mouse. If you’re on a mobile device, enable your motion sensors and see what happens when you move your device around. If you have a VR headset, you can view the poems in full VR.

“Fleet Arcade” is set inside the now-landlocked Fleet Arcade building on Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor waterfront, and explores the complicated ways colonial legacies are memorialized in Hong Kong’s postcolonial era.

“Whitehead” is composed inside multiple date-stamped Google Street View photos of the former site of Hong Kong’s Whitehead Detention Centre, which housed 28,000 Vietnamese asylum seekers in the 1990s. The poem traces the site’s former use through its multiple stages of redevelopment since.

I was commissioned by Container Press to transform a 500-card Rolodex into an artwork as part of their Multitudes series of innovative artists’ books. The result, Miniature Perimeter, maps Okinawa’s Kadena Air Base perimeter fence onto the Rolodex’s spinnable, cylindrical form. Each spread of Rolodex cards is a matched set of images: the view into and out from the fence at the same point along the perimeter. Miniature Perimeter invites you to circumnavigate the base, whose entirety is contained within this Rolodex, as I did in December of 2016. For more details, visit Container.

I co-edit poetry for the online literary journal Juked with Michael Barach. Send us your odd and brilliant poems!

I’m an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where I teach undergraduate and MA creative writing and literature courses. I also supervise PhD students working on critical and creative dissertations, and MA students writing creative thesis projects. Here in HK, I've also taught at the University of Hong Kong, Lingnan University, Hong Kong Baptist University, and the Education University of Hong Kong. Before moving here I was a lecturer at UC Irvine.

Aside from college-level instruction, I teach pedagogical workshops for primary and secondary teachers seeking ways to incorporate creative writing into English classrooms. I am also a consultant for the Hong Kong Education Bureau, which has featured my poetry teaching in instructional videos for its Educational TV channel, and I run poetry and creative technology workshops for school-age students.

If you'd like to know more, or would like to talk about developing courses or community programs, email me.

I conduct poetry workshops for school-aged students at all grade levels here in Hong Kong, primarily in partnership with the Cha Writing Workshop Series. I’ve also designed classroom materials for Nicholas Wong’s pedagogical initiative, Writing Plus, and for the community reading project One City One Book Hong Kong. To talk about how we can bring poetry into more public school classrooms and communities beyond schools, get in touch.