First Contact

By: Liu, Warren

A formally experimental and absurdist mock-epic poem that melds speculative fiction and travel writing

Something on the horizon inches toward the drunken villagers of Zonal Beach, but what--or who--could it be? In First Contact, Warren Liu presents a hilarious, polyphonic poem that narrates the agonizingly slow-motion progress of a first contact encounter between coastal natives and shipwrecked would-be colonizers. Liu's wry, humorous poetry uses three distinct voices to highlight the inherent farce of coming up against a world entirely different from one's own. Slipping between tropes of colonial myth-making and alien encounters, Liu animates the strange, slanted rhymes of history with a voracious wit and deft ear. Whether narrating the choral chatter of the bewildered villagers or a mystic's pop-culture-informed oracular visions or the epistolary reminiscences of a lost exile, Liu demonstrates again and again how colliding with a new culture always happens first as farce, then as farce once more.
Warren Liu is a professor of English at Scripps College in Claremont, California.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 193571726X
• ISBN13: 9781935717263
• Release Date: May 2026
• Publisher: Muae Publishing, Incorporated
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 7.5"