anOther Nemesis Blog Tour: Guest Poet Ai Jiang & Meerkat Gift Card Giveaway!

Poetry by Ai Jiang, Angela Yuriko Smith, Eugen Bacon & Maxwell I. Gold from Meerkat Press

What another Nemesis means to me…

Ai Jiang: When I was contemplating my poems of anOther Nemesis, a barrage of memories, from my childhood in particular, flooded my mind. I was suddenly reminded of all the times I’d been shunned for my identity, all the moments throughout my childhood I’d seen it happen to others, the years I spent desperately trying to assimilate myself, how hard my parents had worked so I could have an easier life than they did, even as we lived among those society would consider “others” and yet were still being othered by those who should have understood us most. I was torn between two identities, and still am now working on how to reconcile them, and watched as my friends around me chose one over the other and shunned those who made a different choice than they had.

To me, anOther Nemesis is resistance, it is reclamation, and it is reconciliation. It is defamiliarization of the self with what should be familiar; an examination of how the world around us has been warping and manipulating our nature into something entirely different through the lens of Western society, its expectations, stereotypes, categorizations and labels. It is a reminder of the ways how voices, languages, selves have been stolen and reinvented, and how we must fight to put together all the broken pieces once more.

A Home You Don’t Remember by Ai Jiang

How to Miss

You’re eager to sip sweet nectar

from deep chasms and explore

the long winding valleys of the place

of your birth. But how do you miss

a place that seems like only a passing

portrait because it has been so long

since your physical body roamed

across its soils, stepped into its marrows,

uprooted

from its grooves, troughs, and furrows?

a place renamed, unnamed, renamed,

until it has forgotten what it had been

before the touch of human hands,

untrodden by human footprints,

now holding memories not its own.

Bio: Ai Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian writer, Ignyte, Bram Stoker, and Nebula Award winner, and Hugo, Astounding, Locus, Aurora, and BFSA Award finalist from Changle, Fujian currently residing in Toronto, Ontario. She is the recipient of Odyssey Workshop’s 2022 Fresh Voices Scholarship and the author of A Palace Near the Wind, Linghun, and I AM AI. Find her at www.aijiang.ca.

RELEASE DATE: February 17, 2026

GENRE: Dark Speculative Poetry

BOOK PAGE: https://meerkatpress.com/books/another-nemesis/

SUMMARY:

This dark and thought-provoking poetry collection is co-authored by four multi-award-winning authors and poets, Ai Jiang, Angela Yuriko Smith, Eugen Bacon and Maxwell I. Gold.

anOther Nemesis unravels sinister speculative poems themed The Colonizers, Primal Sources, Nameless Others and Crooked Ontologies. It reconnoitres words as weapons, reshaping to the unworldly, casting transfigurations of that which was never meant to be changed, and featuring poignant behind-the-poems by each poet.

The extraordinary assemblage interrogates the ways cultures, language, information, and the lack thereof are used as means of control; how voices will always rise against systems that rewrite identity, suppress truth, and silence dissent; the distinctions of purity and diffusion and the infinite number of fates upon which our existence is simultaneously contingent; how Ubiquitous indifference can sometimes be the cruelest villain of them all... and more!

BUY LINKS:

GIVEAWAY: $25 Meerkat Press Giftcard

https://meerkatpress.com/?rafflepress_page=rafflepress_render&rafflepress_id=7