Mad Diva

‘A brand new poetry collection from maverick musician and writer, Cadence Chung.’
Mad Diva on the Unity Books Wellington Bestseller list for the week ending 11 April Read

‘When I need to dematerialise and project myself to some far-off place, I have been turning to the arrangements by poet, musician and mezzo-composer Cadence Chung. Poems in Mad Diva, her third book, soar with drama and deliver intimate, tragic romances. The collection also deliciously blurs realms, with pieces set in Ubers, the aisles of Whitcoulls and under a burning stage spotlight. Chung’s work evokes encompassing operatic feelings. I’m approaching each one gently, steadying myself for the highs and lows as they come.’
Madeleine Crutchley for VIVA, New Zealand Herald Read

‘Chung is formidable in this debut, as much in the dexterity of their pen and breadth of their artistry, as in their unflinching quest for the sublime. Rising to the challenge of Hawthorne’s statement, she offers us a modern epic – one in which the mad diva makes no apologies for her extravagance, for surrendering to the performance. She pulls you in with her siren song and hits every note with full confidence, her indulgence a spectacle we’ll always pay to see.’
Melanie Kwang for Kete Books Read

‘I am always experimenting with things. At the Dunedin launch, Rush Vyas the poet, said something about the book, that is was ‘crystalline but never crystalised’ – which I really loved because I never want to be set in a certain form or a certain voice or anything like that, so there’s lots of different voices here … You’d always hope that a poem is a tiny little transformation for both the readers and the writer.’
Cadence Chung speaks to Morrin Rout for Bookenz, Plains FM Listen

‘As per a friend’s recommendation, I’m reading The Waves by Virginia Woolf. The little blue copy he lent me is always lurking in my backpacks and handbags, and I normally pull it out when I’m on the bus. Woolf is always a difficult but rewarding read. I first read Orlando when I was in high school, and as a young queer poet I was absolutely obsessed … I’m also reading Issue 19 of Starling Magazine. Starling was one of the first magazines I was published in, and my poetry career really grew ever since I first appeared in it as a little Year 10. I think it’s such a vital venture and I always find it exciting to see the line-up.’
Cadence Chung speaks to Sapeer Mayron for The Sunday Star Times Read

‘It’s taken into account a lot of inspirations from all of the different genres I work within … I was especially inspired by my studies in English Literature and music, all of these divas or ‘crazy women’ throughout history that have often been portrayed in a negative light, when really they often haven’t done that much wrong, or the sort of ‘wrongs’ that are portrayed because they’re just strong women expressing their desires … A lot of poems in the collection are named after favourite divas in the canon.’
Cadence Chung speaks to Amy Delahunty for In the Neighbourhood Wellington Access Radio 106.1 FM Listen

‘I always feel like I conceive of a book as a chance to do something really interesting and something out of the ordinary, and to really cultivate a voice that you might not get a chance to when you’re writing a whole bunch of little poems … I could play around with these larger-than-life characters and concepts while also bringing them into the real world, entwining these dramatic, theatrical, musical, poetical worlds into our own in a way that you don’t often get the time to in shorter works.’
Cadence Chung speaks to Jeff Harford for Write Spot, OAR FM with the Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature Listen

‘I’m always writing. I write a lot and then hone it down. What gets published is a tiny fraction of what I actually write. I’m always writing on buses, in lectures – whenever I get the inspiration. But a lot of the time it’s inspired by what I’m reading or watching or listening to, even if I don’t quite realise it at the time. All of that builds up in my subconscious, and then when I write a poem, I find it’s often inspired by those things, which I think comes out a lot in Mad Diva. With my studies in English Literature and music there’s a lot of those sorts of concepts and figures and stories appearing in my poems.’
Cadence Chung speaks to Beth Torrance-Hetherington for Various Artists, 95bFM Listen

'Mad Diva mixes the dramatic tension of classical opera, romantic flourishes and moments from contemporary life to effervescent effect. Across the two-act structure (‘The opera house’ and ‘The madness’), Chung draws on their background in classical singing, music, theatre and short fiction to craft prose poems and poem cycles that embrace the power of character and story. Their poems are not simply re-tellings but new narratives, reminiscent of Angela Carter’s approach to extracting “the latent content” from fairy tales to inspire The Bloody Chamber ... A diva, like all artists, remains restlessly open to the world and to feeling. Our desires both pleasure and torment us. All this to say, if a diva relinquished her art-madness, could she ever be satisfied? Could a poet? What matters, Chung’s Mad Diva illustrates, is that a diva chooses her life, her insatiable desires, even if she never comes to fully understand them.'
Shu-Ling Chua for Cordite Poetry Review Read

‘Much of the work in Cadence Chung’s Mad Diva focuses on performance in a different sense: as a subject. It is poetry about performing, specifically about performing in operas as a mezzo-soprano. Chung, in addition to being the author of two books of poems, is a classical singer and composer. It is also about performing various identities. (But we will come to that.) And what are the great operas of the repertoire usually about? Love. Well, these poems are teeming with love: burgeoning love, ill-advised love, make-believe love, doomed love, hopeful love, queer love, and especially young love. These loves are tangled up with the artistic practices of the speakers of these poems—speakers who sing and write about the heart, who stay out late and party in surprisingly posh hotel rooms, who like well-balanced cocktails and have deep knowledge of perfumes, who consider figs the most erotic of fruits, and say things like ‘They are so red on the inside. / It takes everything in me not to eat them all.’ These are intense, creative speakers living lives of intense creativity. Mad divas, you might say. You have to admire the true-to-life messiness of it. It is a messiness that is itself worthy of an opera.’
Erik Kennedy for Landfall Tauraka Review Read