ECHOLALIA IN SCRIPT
ECHOLALIA IN SCRIPT (Art/ Asemic Writing/ Poetry, December 2017, Orison Books) Available now
Echolalia in Script is a truly original marriage of visual art and poetry. Paired with lines of Roxas-Chua 姚‘s poetry are arresting works of his asemic visual work—artwork that imitates and plays with the idea of script, but which is a purely visual language. Asemic writing is a meditative process for Roxas-Chua 姚, and these images entrance, enrapture, and invite contemplation.
Michael Wiegers, Executive Editor, Copper Canyon Press | Here is writing that is entirely open to the world, a poetry that generously refuses to delimit the human experience or accept only what is known. While it may be defined as ‘asemic writing,’ such definition sterilizes what we have before us: a poetry that precedes language, a personally rhythmic grammar that plays among the tools of expression, and explores the outer boundaries of the rational as it searches for connection. In today’s literary climate, Echolalia in Script is refreshingly, breathtakingly transcendent.
Sandra Alcosser, author of Except by Nature and Sleeping Inside the Glacier | The first time I met Sam Roxas-Chua 姚 he invited me to view the nests he’d made of chewed poems. Perhaps a year later he told me that he swam in a vat of pulp to understand the life of paper. And one night he photographed wet Oregon pavement and through his lens transformed soaked sidewalks into Chinese silk panels. Everything Sam does is unscripted. Everything he does is exquisite. His collection of asemic writing, Echolalia in Script, is sublime.
DAVID ST. JOHN, recipient of the Rome Fellowship and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters | Sam Roxas-Chua 姚’s gorgeous collection of asemic writings, Echolalia in Script, presents his gestural inscriptions as they move elegantly over the page as delicately as lyrical strands of light snaking and doubling across the surfaces of a wind-lit mountain lake. Indeed, here lies one whose imagination is writ on water . . . in all of its meditative beauty, deep soul-solace, and artistic resolve!
VALERIE LAKEN, author of Separate Kingdom and Dream House | In this elegant dance between language and image Sam Roxas-Chua姚 at once intensifies and transcends the capacity of marks on the page to make meaning. With every line and brush stroke in this stunning volume Roxas-Chua reminds us of the sheer childlike joy of putting ink to paper, and underscores the power and universality of this primal human act. This is a book to behold and marvel at, not just to read.
LAWRENCE WHEELER, Professor of Humanities and Applied Linguistics, University Honors College, Portland State University | Each time that I have read it, I have been reminded of a passage in François Jacob’s elegant autobiography, The Statue Within; Jacob tells us of the “writing lesson” his beloved grandfather offered him (at a stubborn seven years of age)—playing about with pens, and colored inks, and different papers, so that François might stop seeing writing simply as the labored tracing of absolute forms, but instead as the commitment to its visual and sensual pleasures—to claw at the paper with sharp attack, to stroke and smooth it, to caress and to batter, to splash at it, or to inscribe elegant lines of wiry thinness. At the same time, Roxas-Chua 姚’s powerful work in Echolalia in Script also carries me back to moments spent in the Xubaizhai Collection of calligraphy and painting of the Hong Kong Art Museum, transfixed by centuries-old work that enthralls with its range of textures, its sharp boldness or its subtle lyricism.