Forthcoming in January 2027
“Repair attempts” describes the words and actions people use to heal broken connections and de-escalate conflict. In his debut collection, Cameron Quan transforms this concept into a metaphor for confronting Asian American identity, patriarchal violence, ecological and personal grief, and the very nature of apologies. With dark humor and unflinching honesty, Quan explores what kind of repair is possible in a world marred by atrocities. Dancing across landscapes—but always rooted in the desert of the American Southwest—the poems take us from an imagined American holiday of atonement to the Pope’s apology to Indigenous peoples, from a mother preparing to flee domestic violence to an unsettling childhood game boys play with butterflies. In a chorus of repair attempts that toggle between the personal and political, this collection invites us into difficult territory, where “the point is not to draw blood, / but to synchronize what’s / already bleeding.”
Praise
“What makes an apology sincere, and does sincerity make an apology effective? With grace and sophistication Cameron Quan brilliantly examines the cultural and societal practices surrounding apologies without ever losing the sense of play. This collection shines.”—Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
“What does it mean to write toward those we have harmed in the human and more than human world? Might an apology divert a yet unseen calamity? Cameron Quan writes in his debut collection Repair Attempts, ‘repair is often corporal.’ For Quan, the body is the instrument that must always diffuse conflict with the harm we cause and the harm we receive existing parallel to one another. And, in some logics, parallel lines that always meet. When empathy is insufficient, Quan offers the revelation that ‘the point is not to draw blood, / but to synchronize what’s / already bleeding.’ Luminous and unflinching, Quan’s debut witnesses the lush disrepair of disturbed ecotones and makes them the test sites of reconciliation and tender growth.”—Asa Drake, author of Maybe the Body
“When Cameron Quan was young, he was sent, begrudgingly, to Sunday school. In retaliation, he spent his time there ‘throwing holy artifacts across the room.’ Decades later, those artifacts are still flying; and Quan, with his gift of locating precisely what needs to be desacralized, is still finding artifacts to throw. Repair Attempts describes, with uncanny honesty, the arc of that flight. It is a beautifully crafted catalog of dissections and disclosures, ‘ecoatonements’ and ecstatic truths, infused with and illuminating the theater—and the poetic fantasia—of absolution and apology. Required reading for Sunday, for Monday-through-Saturday school.”—Brandon Shimoda, author of The Grave on the Wall
CAMERON QUAN 