Goddess of Democracy: an Occupy lyric (Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Contest)

Selected by Cathy Park Hong as winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize Written in and of the protest encampments of one of the most sophisticated Occupy movements in recent history, Goddess of Democracy attempts to understand the disobedience and desperation implicated in a love for freedom. Part lyric, part autoethnography, part historical document, these poems orbit around the manifold erasures of the Umbrella protests in Hong Kong in 2014. Leung, who was in those protests while on a Fulbright grant, navigates the ethics of diasporic dis-identity, of outsiderness and passing, of privilege and the pretension of understanding, in these poems that ask: "what is / freedom when divorced from / from?"