Cathy Park Hong

[A] formidable new essay collection . . . I read Minor Feelings in a fugue of enveloping recognition and distancing flinch. . . . [Cathy Park] Hong is writing in agonized pursuit of a liberation that doesn’t look white—a new sound, a new affect, a new consciousness—and the result feels like what she was waiting for.

Minor Feelings is a major reckoning, pulling no punches as the author uses her life’s flashpoints to give voice to a wider Asian American experience, one with cascading consequences.

Hong dissects her experiences as an Asian American to create an intricate meditation on racial awareness in the U.S. Through a combination of cultural criticism and personal stories, Hong, a poet, lays bare the shame and confusion she felt in her youth as the daughter of Korean immigrants, and the way those feelings morphed as she grew older. From analyzing Richard Pryor’s stand-up to interrogating her relationship with the English language, Hong underscores essential themes of identity and otherness.

Cathy Park Hong’s new memoir confronts the tough questions of Asian American identity. Drawing its title from Hong’s theory regarding the impact of racial stereotypes and lies on ethnic minorities, this memoir-in-essays is a must-read at a time of rising racist violence and distrust.

An incendiary nonfiction book about a pressing social issue of the day . . . With its mix of the personal and political, Minor Feelings is the kind of trenchant social critique that’s bound to get people talking.

Hong busts out of the closed loop of Asian American discourse and takes off at a run. It’s not that she doesn’t address the model minority myth, the brutality of casual racism, or the mortifications of a first-gen childhood; she writes passionately about how Asians are dismissed, the lowly ‘carpenter ants of the service industry.’ It’s just that she also makes every ‘immigrant talking point,’ as she calls them, viscerally specific. . . . Hong’s essays make a case for solidarity that begins at self-awareness.

At-times funny, often deeply thought-provoking work...Minor Feelings is an urgent consideration of identity, social structures, and artistic practice. It’s a necessary intervention in a world burgeoning with creativity but stymied by a lack of language and ability to grapple with nuance. Hong takes a step in remedying that.

Self aware and relentlessly sharp essays. Nimble, smart, and deliberate, Minor Feelings is a major conversation starter.

With radical candor, Cathy Hong Park critically examines what it means to be Asian American today and challenges herself and her readers to abandon the idea of a monolithic Asian American experience and instead acknowledge a range of racialized emotions which have been heretofore dismissed.

Part memoir, part cultural criticism, the poet and essayist’s Cathy Park Hong’s first book of prose had me underlining and annotating nearly every page.

A brainy, glinting triptych....Novelistic, meditative, offbeat, and soulful, Cathy Park Hong's poetry is many fathoms deep.

Starred review: Grapples with vocation and origin in a globalizing era. . . . full of luminous surprises.

An entertaining read, even as it says stark and haunting things about race, love, technology, and the capacities of language to hide or reveal unwelcome truths. . . . While there have always been lots of writers warning us about the corruptibility of language in the wrong hands, few others have made an unbrave new world such a pleasure to discover.

Reading this book feels like listening to a symphony: Themes develop, vanish and recur amid Hong’s abundant verbal music....Hong’s triumph is to alienate us from ourselves in order to reaffirm what makes us human.

Part of what makes that worthwhile is Hong’s ability to turn her language into more than pastiche, developing styles of writing that feel dense with the historical richness of the English language—a history of borrowing, invention, and manipulation that Hong honors, in part, by making room for her own inventiveness. . . . a sustaining book, one that believes in the value of being moved by words—the value, that is, of being human.

Cathy Park Hong does everything short of inventing her own language in order to show cultures clashing and spilling into each other.

Will force you to question the possibilities life offers, in the past, the present, and the future.

The mixture of imagination, language, and historical consciousness in this book is marvelous.

A polyglot explosion of unique individual and broader social concerns.

How difference differs us, and how all difference is divided within–these are the themes that Cathy Hong weaves with her lean language throughout these poems. But it’s compassion above all that drives them. We’re always aware of their deeply and demandingly human core. This is a stunning book; it speaks with a meticulous anger that Hong has polished into wry insight and eye-opening delight.