"On the Perpetual Motion of Search": The Transpacific Networked Poetics of Craig Santos Perez and Theresa H.K. Cha

This essay examines Craig Santos Perez's poetic series from unincorporated territory on Guam alongside Theresa Cha's Dictee on the modern Korean diaspora. Thinking through a minor encounter between these two texts, this essay articulates a "transpacific networked poetics" that connects Pacific Island and Asian American literatures in a collective decolonial vision. At their core, both experimental texts use fragmentation as an aesthetic strategy for remapping literary geographies across the Pacific. Rather than only signaling poetic resistance or reflexivity, the fragment operates as a relational and networked form. The essay first explores how the fragment captures the island ontology of a "tiny dot," exposing the cartographic imaginary of empire. Second, it theorizes the submerged life of the fragment that extends beyond textual borders in order to illuminate new decolonial expressions. The fragment aestheticizes relational epistemologies and is a key formal element in transpacific poetics, as disparate Pacific sites have been networked due to overlapping histories of imperialism.