Eternal Worm by Ezra Chiu
Broken Sleep Books
Eternal Worm by Ezra Chiu is a short, unnervingly intimate pamphlet that works through compressed lyric fragments to examine the textures of dependency, disordered embodiment, and queer attachment. The pamphlet sets its erotic and domestic material against a scriptural frame of abhorred flesh, though the register it actually inhabits is closer to the abject-tender: tapeworms, discharge, ants in water, pear-rot, a microwaved bloomer rolled in sugar in place of brioche. Recurring motifs of overdose, psychosomatic illness, office fluorescence, and transmasc bodily self-examination accumulate into something less like narrative than like a mood held under pressure, where pharmacological excess, eating, and love share the same vocabulary of intake and aftermath. The effect is a pamphlet of unsettling economy, alert to cliche and unafraid of it, in which tenderness is never untangled from damage. ABOUT Ezra Chiu: Ezra Chiu is an interdisciplinary artist. Abject tenderness is an overarching theme in his practice. In playing with self-reflection as a device for alienation, he reconciles aspects of fractured or lost identities. He draws from his own experience as a transmasc, second-generation British-Chinese person. Chiu's work walks the line between humorous and grotesque. He greets the kitsch with sombre earnestness.
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