Award-winning poet Chen Chen makes his prose debut with this collection of essays that both charms and challenges. Beginning with a collage featuring the author in a glorious wig before moving into a series of half-flirty, half-prayerful letters addressed to a queer Chinese deity, this is not your typical craft book.

Chen Chen's In Cahoots with the Rabbit God upends notions of the poet as pure ethereal being, always singing, eternally solitary. In place of lofty transcendence, these socially engaged and deeply personal essays/interventions bring the discussion of poetry back down to earth, back to the body and the senses, back to sensual experience and everyday life. Instead of a god who towers above it all, at the heart of this book is a god who curls up beside you as you procrastinate on your writing by waiting for some guy to text you back.

What is poetry? Chen keeps asking throughout this collection that ultimately defies categorization. One of his answers: "overfeeling and overlanguaging." Another of his answers: "a soup dumpling spot." From encountering racism while in line for the bathroom to contemplating what Sailor Moon has to teach us about rage, every page of this book invites us to a fuller, zanier conversation about writing, living, and embracing the actually sacred wherever one finds it.

Chen Chen is the author of three books of poetry, including Quintessential Earthly Activities and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which wasn longlisted for the National Book Award. All of his full-length books are published by Boa Editions and by Bloodaxe Books in the UK. He has also written six chapbooks, most recently Love That For Us (& Change Poetry), a collaboration with Sam Herschel Wein.

His work can be found in Poetry, Ploughshares, 100 Queer Poems, and The Norton Introduction to Literature, among other journals or anthologies. His honors include the Thom Gunn Award, three Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. He lives in Rochester, New York, and teaches for the MFA program at New England College.

"Chen Chen's In Cahoots with the Rabbit God is a sensuous and sumptuous feast of delights-delicious micro essays on the inextricable nature of poetry, identity, and politics, living a queer ass juicy life, forging a deviant craft practice, the importance of literary friendships and Sailor Moon, butts, and writing the ecstatic into the ordinary. With one part horniness, two parts wisdom, and generously topped by/ with Chen's trademark wit and heart, this essay collection is a much needed guidebook for what it means to be gay, Asian, and reveling in the joys of writing in this time." — Muriel Leung

"The understated genius of Chen Chen's poetry—how its intentional, meticulous craft could be misread as stream-of consciousness—lends itself perfectly to this richly insightful collection of critical essays posing as conversations dressed up as diaries. It's so much fun, you almost don't notice how incredibly smart it is. Chen's poetic voice shines in the epistolary prose form—earnestly blunt, immediately lovable, and driven by a boundless and bountiful curiosity that we're lucky to witness blooming in these pages. Generous, hilarious, and achingly intimate, In Cahoots with the Rabbit God will inspire any reader to connect with their inner poet-freak, reflect on their own muses and honor their creativity." — Morgan Parker

"A 'craft' book that only Chen Chen could write. I say craft in quotes because this book is not prescriptive prose about how to write better poems, but a prescription for those looking to fall madly, sickly in love with poetry as Chen has. His love for his genre and his fellow practitioners oozes from these pages with the intelligence, intimacy and humor we have come to love from his poems, but here in an new invitation into the backroom to kneel beside one our most powerful
and playful poets in service of the pure pleasure of poetry and living." — Danez Smith