This anthology was written in 2016 and explores fundamental human emotions through my eyes as a queer person. I chose eight (a lucky number in Chinese culture) poems centered around identity, family, loneliness, and unrequited love I felt at the time, as well as my experience being an immigrant who had just lived in Los Angeles for four years.

In Gaseous, I explore an experience of broken, unrequited, painful love - something that is so ephemeral but unyielding. The first and last poems are to my mom and serve as an opening and closing because my family represent an important part of my continuous search for self-identity. I experimented with form to manifest my various states of mind to ultimately convey how I would orate my poems in the most cathartic manner. I titled the anthology Gaseous because the diffuse, obscure nature of my poems and sentiments are best summed up with the gaseous state of matter – where things are concretely visible, yet hopelessly intangible.

Title image taken by Nathan Cheung (2016), Hong Kong