Annie Won is an American poet whose work connects mind, body, page, collaboration, medicine, sleep, movement, spatial form, and the experimental possibilities of lyric attention. She is a Kundiman Fellow, a former medicinal chemist, and a yoga teacher. Her publications include the collaborative chapbook Once Upon a Building Block with Brenda Iijima, the chapbook so i can sleep, and did the wind blow it.
Won has described a particular interest in the spaces of mind, body, and page. That triad offers a strong way into her practice. Thought occupies conceptual space, the body occupies physical space, and the poem occupies the visual field of the page. Her work brings these dimensions into contact through image, pause, movement, collaboration, and close attention to language.
He grabs her ass.
The surviving record preserves Won’s title He grabs her ass. The poem body is absent from the current profile, so its lines remain unreconstructed. The title itself presents an abrupt bodily action in a complete declarative sentence.
Its force comes from compression. Subject, verb, possessive relation, and body part appear without explanation. The sentence leaves questions of setting, consent, reaction, power, and consequence open while making physical contact immediate.
The broader guide to poetry offers a useful context for how title, syntax, direct statement, bodily image, and omission can create strong lyric pressure.
The body
Won’s interest in bodily space gives physical language a central role. The body can be experienced from within through sensation and from outside through social perception. Touch, posture, breath, fatigue, sleep, illness, desire, and movement all create different forms of attention.
Poetry can hold these experiences closely because a line can move between sensation and thought without requiring a long explanatory bridge.
Aby Kaupang offers a neighboring route through poetry where body, vulnerability, care, spiritual pressure, and intimate responsibility shape contemporary lyric experience.
Mind, body, page
Mind, body, and page form three distinct spaces with different rules. Thought can move instantly; the body moves through physical duration; the page fixes language spatially enough for a reader to return to it.
Won’s stated interest in these spaces suggests poetry as a place where mental and physical experience can be arranged visually.
John Mercuri Dooley offers a neighboring route through poetry where typography, visual arrangement, photography, multimedia practice, and page architecture shape interpretation.
Spatial form
White space can change pace before a word is read. A phrase isolated on the page receives a different weight from the same phrase embedded in a dense paragraph. Line breaks can create hesitation, acceleration, suspension, or visual relation.
Spatial form therefore becomes part of syntax.
Rachel Abramowitz offers another route through poetry where visual spacing, surreal domesticity, grief, and the page treated as a compositional field remain central.
Medicinal chemistry
Won’s background as a medicinal chemist adds another vocabulary of matter to her literary practice. Chemistry depends on structure, reaction, concentration, bonds, measurement, transformation, and the behavior of substances under specific conditions.
Scientific training can sharpen habits of observation and precision even when a poem moves far from technical language.
Antonio Facchino offers another route through poetry where technical vocabulary, bodily vulnerability, systems, machinery, and altered perception enter one experimental field.
Transformation
Chemistry studies changes in matter. Poetry also depends on transformation: an ordinary object becomes image, a memory becomes form, a bodily event becomes language, and one phrase changes meaning when placed beside another.
Won’s cross-disciplinary life makes transformation a useful way to understand the movement among science, bodily practice, and poetry.
The archive’s guide to experimental poetry provides a broad context for writing that treats structure, process, fragmentation, visual arrangement, and specialized vocabularies as compositional material.
Once Upon a Building Block
Once Upon a Building Block, written with Brenda Iijima, places collaboration inside Won’s bibliography. The title joins fairy-tale language with construction. “Once upon” opens narrative time, while a building block suggests modular structure, childhood play, architecture, and combination.
The collaborative form gives this modular idea a social dimension. Each writer contributes language another writer can receive and redirect.
Ryan B. Richey offers a neighboring route through poetry where shared authorship, sequence, fragment, and repeated exchange become central structures.
Collaboration with Brenda Iijima
Brenda Iijima’s practice crosses poetry, visual art, ecological thinking, performance, and publishing. Working together places Won’s attention to body and page inside a conversation with another writer deeply interested in material and environmental systems.
Collaboration can make the poem an encounter among different habits of attention.
Eric Baus, Noah Eli Gordon, Nick Moudry, and Sara Veglahn offer another route through collective composition, editorial communities, sound, and shared authorship.
so i can sleep
The title so i can sleep gives rest a causal structure. Something must happen, change, finish, or be spoken in order for sleep to become possible.
Sleep occupies a threshold between conscious control and dream. The body becomes still while mental life changes form.
J. Marie Wilkinson offers another route through surviving poetry evidence where dream, animals, multiplicity, and altered imaginative scale create a nocturnal literary field.
Sleep and attention
Insomnia intensifies awareness of the body. Breathing, temperature, sheets, noise, muscle tension, light, and repeated thoughts can become unusually noticeable.
A poem concerned with sleep can therefore move between bodily detail and mental repetition with natural ease.
Andrew Lundwall offers another route through poetry where night, body, treatment, rooms, fragmented syntax, and altered states of attention create an extended field.
Yoga and embodied attention
Won’s work as a yoga teacher places breath, posture, balance, duration, and bodily awareness inside her wider creative life. Yoga asks practitioners to notice changes that can be subtle: weight distribution, tension, alignment, breath, attention, and transitions among positions.
These habits have clear affinities with poetic attention because both practices reward sensitivity to small changes.
Todd Shalom offers another route through poetry where bodily movement, walking, public space, prompts, sound, and attention become explicit compositional methods.
did the wind blow it
did the wind blow it turns a simple question into an unstable account of cause. Wind is invisible except through what it moves: leaves, hair, fabric, dust, branches, doors, paper, clouds, or sound.
The title directs attention toward evidence and uncertainty. Something has shifted, and the speaker asks what force produced that change.
Claudia Grinnell offers a neighboring route through poetry where weather, movement, ordinary environments, uncertainty, and change give physical conditions emotional force.
Kundiman
Won is a Kundiman Fellow. Kundiman has supported Asian American writers through retreats, workshops, readings, mentorship, and literary community. Fellowship places individual writing inside sustained conversation with peers and traditions.
Community can create the conditions for experimentation by giving writers attentive readers and durable relationships.
Julie Kizershot offers another route through poetry where teaching, literary programming, experimental traditions, and community sustain writing across generations.
Small-press poetry
Won’s chapbooks emerged through independent poetry presses whose catalogues support concentrated, formally adventurous work. The chapbook allows a sequence or collaboration to take physical form at an intimate scale.
Such books circulate through readings, bookstores, exchanges, festivals, and direct relationships among writers and readers.
Carl Annarummo offers another route through poetry where chapbooks, handmade books, visual design, collage, and independent publishing make the material life of literature central.
Critical writing
Won has also published literary reviews. Reviewing another writer requires a different kind of attention: description, interpretation, quotation, judgment, and an account of how form produces effects.
Critical writing can sharpen poetic practice by making choices of structure, image, rhythm, and diction more consciously visible.
Chris Murray offers another route through poetry where criticism, teaching, editing, rhetoric, and literary community form one sustained practice.
Reading Annie Won
Won’s literary identity emerges through mind, body, page, medicine, yoga, collaboration, sleep, spatial form, Asian American literary community, small presses, and careful attention to physical experience.
Within contemporary poetry, her work represents an American experimental practice in which bodily and visual spaces continually reshape language.
The strongest route into Won is to follow movement among the three spaces she has named as central to her interests. Notice how thought changes inside the body, how the body changes through breath and touch, and how the page gives those changes a visible form. Her poetry makes attention spatial.