Demonstrator

Stanford Cheung’s newly awaited full-length collection Demonstrator turns to the cities of Fukuoka to draw inspiration from an imagined “installation society.” Among the actors around him: commuters, skyscrapers, pachinko machines, strangers and lovers, which form his personal yet socially narrative arc. What results is a sublime artistic range in Cheung’s never-ending quest to uncover noises, sounds and rhythms never heard.

"Cheung’s poetry here evokes Haruomi Hosono, John Cage, Flaming Lips, Cabaret Voltaire and The Beatles, often in a G. M. Hopkins-like cadence… It is once surreal yet accessible & with a conscience as it describes human relationships movingly."

– Taylor Mignon

Co-founding editor of Tokyo Poetry Journal

"The highly refined and deftly insightful poems so intrinsically imagistic, yet animated, yet tempered like echoes, in my mind. This is a powerful, strict, beauteous collection I will be re-reading again and again."

– Marc di Saverio

author of Crito di Volta

“What arrives is a singular voice tuned to both the discordant cacophony and the luminous…”

– Mark Gurarie

author of Everybody’s Automat

Stanford Cheung is a poet and musician from Toronto. He is the author of the collection Structures from the Still (Akinoga, 2018). Among his collaborative books include We Could Be Anything (Crevasse, 2019), Comfort of Malice (Inspiritus, 2018), and Any Seam or Needlework (The Operating System, 2016). His poetry appears in anthologies and magazines such as the Tokyo Poetry Journal, Nomadic Journal, Otoliths, Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu, Ricepaper and elsewhere.