China Cowboy

In the technicolor timewarp called Hell, Hong Kong, wannabe cowgirl La La is hellbent on realizing her dream to be a folk-singing sensation, even if it means surviving a dysfunctional relationship with her kidnapper, Ren, who is just hellbent. Ren thinks he'll win, but La La, dead or alive, always wins.

PRAISE FOR CHINA COWBOY

...grossly disturbing and excruciatingly seductive, catching the reader in a tense push and pull with and against the text. Sticky and stuck among the f*cking and f*cked-up, Short binds us within tales of fierce femme survival...

-- Jai Arun Ravine, The Lantern Review

A satanically intricate narrative with seemingly infinite vantage points in space, time and sympathy ... has expanded and fused the poetic and narrative fields, creating a zone where elegance and grace can gambol with the just-plain-f*cked-up.

-- Sarah Heady, HTML Giant

[A]s savage as it is entertaining, [Gek Lin Short's] ambitious story -- while bleak -- is a marvel of modern storytelling, [with] characters whose stories will haunt you long after you finish the book, and will more than likely draw you back for another read.

-- John Deming and Steven Karl, Coldfront s Top 40 Poetry Books of 2012

Bring[s] the reader to the brink of every sensory extreme and back again ... a darkly surreal adventure in perception that leaves one's nerves exposed and moral fortitude shaken.

-- Travis Macdonald, Fact-Simile

China Cowboy pulls me deep into "the belly of Hell," a genre- and voice-switching push-and-pull that La La with her indomitable will refuses to give way to... La La may be victimized, but she never submits... I want every child to own such unyielding puissance; I want it for me, too.

-- Marthe Reed, OPEN / Horse Less Press

Moving between the explicit descriptions of the Marquis de Sade and the implicit ironies of Nabokov, these pieces are excruciatingly compelling, so infernal as they are related in languages variously pornographic and desperately, radically tender. Short's brilliant tragicomedy can be read as a metaphor for China's dynamic with American culture or the story of any determined enterprising youth whose eager "bloody head" under a bumbling tyrant's "boot is bent." A bold, imaginative, timely work from a courageous and complex thinker.

-- Heidi Lynn Staples

Heated & heartbreaking, China Cowboy charms like wedding cans, flesh-filled, on tarmac. This car (perhaps an old, long Cadillac with longhorns glaring & charred) contains a man, Ren: a "family man" or "something commensurate." La-La: our heroine. & the driver, guiding us expertly over the bluegrass, bodies & Time Warps of Hell, child abuse, power & Country Music is Kim Gek Lin Short.

-- Rauan Klassnik

China Cowboy is more hydra than hybrid, a slim monster sprouting new directions for form, narrative, culture, and identity. Meanwhile, everything it bites comes to vicious, gorgeous life.

-- Christian TeBordo

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kim Gek Lin Short is the author of China Cowboy (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2012) and The Bugging Watch and Other Exhibits(Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010), as well as two chapbooks, The Residents (dancing girl press, 2008) and Run (Rope-a-Dope, 2010). She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and daughter.