How do you love? What gives you joie de vivre? How do we build the world we want to see, the one that’s in our hearts?
Thick as My Noodles, Bok Choy of My Soul is a fierce, tender and emotionally resonant debut collection of poetry from North Meridian Press from Shan Shan Song, a queer, trans, neurodivergent, Chinese-American poet, singer, songwriter and community organizer.

Song’s collection is all about feeling your feelings, finding your feet and finding your people, holding the friends and community you have close and fighting against the wrongs in the world. With strength, love and rage, Song’s poetry and imagery are contemporary, irreverent, playful, powerful and stick in your mind long after the last word has faded from the page. In tenderness and intimacy, in grief, hope, joie de vivre, pure trans joy and queer lust and love, Song writes about living and surviving at the ferocious intersections of queerness, race, disability and gender.

From a bowl of steaming, hot, hand-made noodles to the sweat of dark nightclubs in Chicago, from the intimacy of a dear friendship to the embrace of lovers and fighting at wing chun, Song uplifts the global and interconnectedness of political struggle, daily unending personal mental health struggle, the power of queer chosen family, survival, joy, community and love. Written throughout multiple administrations of presidents they don’t agree with and throughout the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, this collection of poems will warm you in the fight and hold you as heal in the darkness of the night as you rage at injustices in the world and at the system.

If you’ve ever hid and disassociated in the gender-neutral bathroom in an OCD spiral from feeling like you don’t belong when the what-ifs get too loud, this debut volume of love letters and battle cries is for you.

About the Author:
Shan Shan Song was born in Worcester, Massachusetts where Emma Goldman famously had her ice cream shop, and raised in Naperville, Illinois. Shan Shan Song lives on the unceded homelands and ancestral lands of the Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Odawa, Peoria, Miami, Ho-Chunk, Sac, Fox and Menominee peoples.

Based in Chicago, Shan Shan Song is a Chinese-American, neurodivergent, trans, queer, poet, singer, songwriter and community organizer. They earned their B.Sc. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and have half of their MSW degree. Their writing has been published by North Meridian Press, libcom.org and AK Press in Queering Anarchism.
When they’re not snapping photos of their favorite landscapes and meals, they like to spend time petting as many cats as they can and making new recipes for their polycules and loves. They have one cat named Artemis, are sometimes the parent of a sourdough starter and are a vocalist in the band Amygdala Hijack.

Follow them on Instagram at @shan.shan.songbird.

Praise for the Book:

Reading Thick as My Noodles, Bok Choy of My Soul, sometimes one poem reminds you of everything, one story, one body in space, walking through a city, hoping for something.

For a short while I lived in Chicago, walking, looking for something, losing everything, finding a city of characters, flop houses, trains, blues lounges and leather bars. I learned about sexologist Alred Kinsey’s explorations of prisons, queers in jail, locked up, in and out of the underworld. When Kinsey conducted research in Chicago in 1939 and 1940, he found that queer life was far more expansive than understood, the world more diverse, much like gall wasps he collected as a young entomologist, that assumptions of sexuality needed to be more tolerant and less judgmental.

Chicago was a critical location for the study of queer lives, reminding us that notions of “normal” and "abnormal" sexual behavior missed the mark. I can only imagine what would have happened if he’d come across the boisterous, heartwarming, comradley poems of Shan Shan Song, who locates Chicago at the center of their queer imaginary. This is a poetry of a city, a space for lovers and mental health breakdowns, for polyamory and wrestling practice, social work and trauma. Born in Worcester, MA, “where Emma Goldman had her ice cream shop,” Shan Shan Song’s story is a city, Chinese-American, neurodivergent, transamorous, of songwriting, community organizing, petting cats, making new recipes for polycules and singing.

Dive in and discover a cosmos. 

-Benjamin Heim Shepard, author of On Activism, Friendship and Fighting (Common Notions, 2025), White Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Pandemic (Cassell press, 1997).