You Still Have Something of The Ghost About You by JinJin Xu
For International Women’s Day, here’s a cento videopoem by JinJin Xu 徐今今, a poet and filmmaker from Shanghai. Here’s the Vimeo description:
The cento-film “You Still Have Something of the Ghost About You” was shot in the hauntingly empty casinos during the COVID-19 pandemic in Macau, China after I left mandatory government quarantine and realized I’d stumbled into the underworld. The polyvocal collage slips the viewer into an otherworldly, post-COVID globalized hypnosis: interweaving strangely prescient texts from Chinese and Western epics such as Dream of the Red Chamber, Journey to the West, Beastiary, Dante’s Inferno, and contemporary texts such as John Cage’s X, and Gu Cheng’s Ying’er, to journey into the afterlife of forgetfulness.
As a former comparative literature major, I love this blend! And I’m always excited to see up-and-coming poets integrating filmmaking into their practice. Xu’s bio notes that after getting her BA at Amherst College, she “traveled for a year as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow recording docu-poems with women dislocated across nine countries.” She’s currently in the MFA program at NYU, and her chapbook There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife just came out in November, after winning the inaugural Own Voices Chapbook Prize from Radix Media. Be sure to follow her on Vimeo.
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Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.
