Click here to listen to a conversation with psychiatrist and poet Jonathan Chou, author of the award-winning poetry collection Resemblance. 

In this wide-ranging interview, Chou reflects on how language, memory, identity, and trauma converge in both his clinical work and poetic practice. Speaking with Narrative Mindworks, he explores what it means to write from a space of multiplicity, grief, and historical rupture—especially as an Asian-American navigating the intertwined legacies of diaspora and collective trauma.

Through a blend of poetic experimentation, narrative inspiration and psychiatric insight, Chou invites us to reconsider how stories are told, how identities are formed, and how we relate to one another across difference. Whether discussing the ethics of representation, the opacity of language, or the therapeutic value of syntax, this conversation is a moving meditation on what it means to feel deeply, listen closely, and write honestly.

“Life is not lived in a sort of linear way. It's much more complicated than that.  That feels beautiful to me. That feels right.”