The NY Times began the new year with a piece about the Hmong American Writers’ Circle and the cultural context in which it operates. And our most recent issue of the Lantern Review put a spotlight on HAWC in Community Voices. This is only the beginning of much-deserved attention for this unique generation of new writers.

How Do I Begin is an apt title for an anthology of writers whose ethnic identity is doubly marginalized: though the Hmong roots are in southwest China, most emigrated/fled to the US from places like Laos or Vietnam after the Vietnam-American War. Burlee Vang, in his introduction to the book, describes himself as “born into a people whose written language has long been substituted by an oral tradition.” The written language of the Hmong was lost after assimilation in Imperial China long ago; this is not to mention assimilation into Thai and Lao culture, where most Hmong are provided an education only in their host countries’ official languages. The Hmong language has remnants in traditional embroidery but they have become indecipherable. Writers identifying as Hmong American today, therefore, have the tremendous task not only of writing themselves into history and literature, but also of gathering their names and identities from the pieces available. English is their adopted language, and so these writers must weave a warp and woof through multiple traditions.

The writing of themselves is a doubly difficult task because of the relationship between art and identity politics. Almost worth the purchase of the book alone are the short statements beginning each author’s pieces: in them, the writers describe their relationship to the term “Hmong American writer.” Many of How Do I Begin’s contributors wonder whether the Hmong part or the writer part takes primacy, and many are skeptical of the “object of exoticism” and of ethnic identity as “artistic limitation.” They struggle with negotiating the universal (empathy) and the individual (alienation). These writings are like a hand opening and closing, pulsing, from palm to fist. The impulse to “transcend ethnic and geographic boundaries” is paired with the impulse to preserve those boundaries and distinctions. Vang writes, “We have overcome ourselves. Our writing attests to this. Legitimizes us.” That overcoming is a matter of ownership and self-creation; yet the question of legitimacy is raised, and one wonders, On whose terms? Mai Der Vang uses the word paradox in her statement: “Writing for me has become a roadmap to navigate the paradoxes of life.” Sandra McPherson writes in her advance praise that these writers “are new to themselves and yet they already have their elders.”

Because their chosen language is English, these writers’ elders must be equated across cultures. The two epigraphs of Vang’s introduction, for instance, are from Shakespeare and Hmong American poet Pos L. Moua. The Shakespeare quote comes from Hamlet V.ii, when Hamlet describes waking suddenly on his execution-bound ship: “Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting, / That would not let me sleep . . .” He finds the letter from Claudius commanding England to behead him, and he rewrites the letter, thus rewriting his fate. The scene’s metaphor echoes with two of the last lines of verse in this anthology, from a poem by Mai Der Vang: “When all along you think the only war / is the one inside you.” And the epigraph from Pos L. Moua is the voice of a different elder: “Then they rode in canoes secretly arranged for them . . . / straight toward the world where the torches are burning.”

All throughout the anthology are reconfigurations of cultural inheritance. Iconic images like picket fences are challenged in Soul Choj Vang’s poem “Here I Am,” while the Carveresque image of fishing in Americais written from a different perspective in V. Chachoua Xiong-Gnandt’s “Lake Red Rock, Iowa” and then in Ying Thao’s essay “The Art of Fishing.” Martha Vang’s poem “Still Life of a Fruit Bowl” paints for us not apples and oranges but

plaintains, lychees, longans, and mangoes.
Pomegranate seeds are sprinkled around the
spiky jack and durian.

Soul Choj Vang’s “Our Field” lines up a mythic history of place names and people’s names that begins in the East and ends in the West. The poem concludes with the exhortation: “Hold on to our new fields!” Bryan Thao Worra’s “The Spirit Catches You, and You Get Body Slammed” plays with exotic expectations by taking us to Missoula with thoughts of “an auspicious moon above ancient Qin” while a shaman speaks enthusiastically in Hmongabout “Randy Macho Man Savage!” The image of the wrestling ring is an apt one as we think about the way these writers grapple with themselves in the box of their spaces, and as we think of Anthony Cody’s words, a Mexican American writer contributing to this anthology in the “hope to connect to tangents of the universal human experience and tie us to one another.”

The experience of the alien is another theme. That now-indecipherable embroidery, the paj ntaub, graces the cover of this book in an artistic rendering. In Burlee Vang’s author statement, he claims as his goal “some universal experience or truth, despite how alien the world, situation, or characters . . .” Andre Yang’s poem “Cousins” gestures at a painful language of love and recognition even “amongst the chorus of insects / that must have been so familiar to you, that were so foreign to me.” Bryan Thao Worra’s poem “Modern Life” ends with the speaker

Waiting for the cops in their fancy cruisers
To blink
So our race can begin

That is a blink of longed-for recognition from authorities, and it is a blink that quickens the gap between the alien and the invisible.

There is a self-estrangement involved in all writing, in the creation of all memories, and it is useful to consider Ka Vang’s formulation: “Being Hmong makes me a better writer and being a writer makes me a better Hmong.” This awareness of a split identity is one of upward lift, like two waves rising in their collision.

I cannot stress enough the importance of this anthology, or how exciting it is to read these new voices and see the stirring of a people in words. I believe that the work of this anthology is not merely one of extending history or of grafting on labels. “Hmong American literature” is not a name; it is a conversation, an evolution. Bryan Thao Worra writes:

There is often the implication that ethnicity can be separated or masked in writing. This cannot be done any more than we can disguise the time in which we write. [. . .] my work remains, and that is my true body.

NOT MERELY BECAUSE OF THE UNKNOWN THAT WAS STALKING TOWARD THEM

“Sewing,” “pockets” and “stories” being things that don’t quite exist in the Neverland, Jenny Boully’s not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them sews pockets in and around the mythos of J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy. Cutting snippets of Barrie’s source text, including Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and events in Andrew Birkin’s J.M. Barrie & the Lost Boys, Boully centralizes Wendy’s experience and sews up bits of her story, stitching the make-believe into the made-quite-real. In her pockets, open ends and open endings fit and hover.

“places in the earth are breaking”

Every page of not merely because is footnoted with a section called “The Home Under Ground,” while the rest of the text wraps itself around. Boully is famous for having written an entire book in footnotes, The Body: An Essay (Slope Editions, 2002 and Essay Press, 2007); these footnotes referenced empty pages—a nonexistent text. In notes 1 and 2 of The Body she writes, “…everything that is said is said underneath… / It is not the story I know or the story you tell me that matters; it is what I already know, what I don’t want to hear you say. Let it exist this way, concealed…”

That she chooses to reference the concealed, underground home where Peter Pan, Wendy and the lost boys lived in her footnotes to not merely because made me think of Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Small Arguments (Pedlar Press, 2003). Thammavongsa studies a variety of fruit and insects and reveals, in the words of Bertrand Russell, “the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things in daily life.” Boully’s line “A mushroom head here, a celery stalk there, three new baby bird graves, a fiddlehead here; places in the earth are breaking” echoes Thammavongsa’s poem “The Ground”: “You will not leave / or keep from / this ground, a breaking.”

Boully’s footnotes also recall Padcha Tuntha-obas’ “a poem composed to call one’s self” in her book Trespasses (O Books, 2006), in which a gutter of text continues on its own track throughout the poem: “but even then silence speaks, quietly.” Boully, Thammavongsa and Tuntha-obas’ use of foot- and ground- noting causes breaks in the page and breaks in our encounter with the text. Like street ditches hauling off rain, language flows from page to page and spills out. Text run-off settles here at the bottom, “nicely crammed,” like a kind of sedimentation. *

“nicely crammed” / “a mere scrawling”

I could only approach not merely because in the hour before dusk; I wanted to get under wool blankets by a fire and eat pumpkin muffins fresh out of the oven in order to read this book. In Barrie’s text, the Neverland is a map that exists in all children’s minds, in all children’s dreams:

Of all the delectable islands the Neverland is the snugggest and most compact; not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed. When you play at it by day with the chairs and table-cloth, it is not in the least alarming, but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it becomes very nearly real. That is why there are night-lights. (J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Wendy, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1988, p. 13)

Boully’s book became “very nearly real” for me during these winter nights. The back cover blurb says, “…Boully reads between the lines of a text…and emerges with the darker underside, with those sinister or subversive places merely echoed or hinted at.” Having also read Barrie’s text, I find that the original story is already quite dark and awkwardly twisted. The Neverland is a world of recurring trauma and chronic amnesia, wrapped up in a child’s ignorance, which continues to circle itself. Sexuality is no stranger to Barrie’s story either, but Boully does unravel the hems a bit further, taking a peek at Tiger Lily’s pubes, Hook’s pubic-y beard, Wendy’s panties, poo, peepee and pooper holes.

The realness of make-believe washing, make-believe medicine, make-believe food and make-believe sex—stink, sickness, malnutrition and still-birth—peep through Boully’s stitches. Peter and Hook’s sexual interest in Tiger Lily, Tinker Bell and Wendy, and intimations of abuse, are written up from underneath.

“Wendy began to be scrawled all over with him. … Whether the he is the little Betwixt-and-Between or whether the Betwixt-and-Between is he: there is a male hand, and it is scrawling on a little girl. All over, that is. At what point is the girl no longer herself but a mere scrawling” (56).

Peter’s pubes all strung up with crustaceans and barnacles: what must be hiding deep within the lagoon, gathering itself in some fishy fallopian tube? … Such a little hole too; do you think the Peter bird will break through, break through? … The Tinker dental dam; the Tinker tampon. Old little tin cup you drank from: look! They’ve taken to using it as. And your little still-birth, all like a tadpole, all a-gasping in your little kettle of water.
__________________
The Home Under Ground
… For example, [Peter] can put a little something inside of you, and you will carry that for the rest of your life; thimble all empty underneath in the inside. The molar pregnancy: lasting, lasting; placenta all set to bursting, all full of nothing, nothing. (60-62)

Could Tinker Bell, Tiger Lily or Wendy have gotten pregnant in the Neverland? In a place where nothing is planted, where it is forbidden to speak about mothers, where it is forbidden to grow up, where there are no babies, where so many things die—is anything conceived? Born? Grown? “Why, I think I should like to be a farmer, says he, right when we were sending you out to sea.”

“the end has been hovering”

“Don’t write down what actually happened; instead, write down what you wanted to believe.” In not merely because Boully animates the tension between the make-believe and the made quite real, but even more so, she opens up the dream in-between the story and the hand of the storyteller. Wendy transforms from “a mere scrawling” to the one in control of the end—instead of re-telling Barrie’s/Peter’s/Hook’s story, she sews new ones and writes them true. Boully’s hypnotic use of rhyme, addictive phrase repetition and clever end-of-sentence clips create unexpected echoes and stops, and loose ends to sew up.

What I wanted to give you was this here little tiny piece. Of me. If it heals; if it heals properly, it won’t leave. Such a scar. Where it’s red, it’s only red for just a little. While. Return soon. To normal it will. … Some night, in dream, when I will have climbed the look-out, it won’t be you who I see, but rather another more distant star, another darker molting of sky. And so you will lie. And I will not be there too—not in a hovel, not in a bottle, not in a happy-ending novel, not in a kitchen serving eggs for two, and certainly not in a parallel grave from you. (18)

Playing dead = growing up, growing up = forgetting, forgetting = the end. What intrigues me about not merely because is the exploration of Peter’s role as a grave digger, as a kind of ghost or angel that buries (i.e. plants) children in the earth so that they pop out new. This is hinted at in Barrie’s text: “There were odd stories about him, as that when children died he went part of the way with them, so that they should not be frightened.” The Neverland is a make-believe dream and a real afterlife, and Peter Pan is made of earth and lives underground, both exceptionally old and exceptionally young.

What also strikes me about not merely because is Boully’s/Wendy’s insistence on planting things, on growing things, on bearing—not just in childbirth, but in what it means to “mother” and to sustain, outside the traditional gendered role, to sustain the effort it takes to remember. The final chapter of Barrie’s Peter and Wendy includes an additional scene written after his original play premiered, which suggests that just as Peter came for Mrs. Darling, Wendy’s mother, he will also come for Wendy’s daughter Jane, and her daughter Margaret, on and on and so forth. Boully writes, threading in Barrie’s words: “Two is the beginning of the end. As in, you and me, Peter; we make two and the story, and the story takes on an and then.” Remembering, beyond vague recognition, to break the cycle, is behind Boully’s writing.

And so, Wendy hides things that will later be found. Her endings are pockets, and nesting inside are buried secrets. “Oh, Peter, you’re turning every pocket, every pocket: inside out, inside out! But I have the acorn button. The acorn button is something that, up until now, I’ve kept. Silent about.” Boully fits footnotes into these pockets, like the note Wendy slips into the pocket of her granddaughter’s nightgown, to remind us.

_______________________________
“What is a pocket but a hole? A home.”
* Coincidentally, Boully, Thammavongsa, Tuntha-obas and myself are all Thai writers. Something about our obsession with what is concealed, with what lies just below the surface, with what is between the lines, feels culturally resonant for me—what is never unearthed and never spoken maintains its own economy. For an exceptional essay by Boully on pad Thai, being mixed and the small places we argue and withhold in language, visit “A Short Essay on Being” at TriQuarterly.

Bao Phi's SONG I SING

A Guest Post by Greg Choy

Sông I Sing by Bao Phi | Coffee House Press 2011 | $16

Greg Choy

After reading Bao Phi’s remarkable collection of poems, Sông I Sing, I was reminded of an incident that occurred about ten years ago when I was an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. I was attending a panel discussion at UMinn entitled, simply, “Asian American Poetry,” sponsored in large part by Minnesota Poets Society, and was greatly looking forward to listening to two acclaimed Asian American poets speak on the topic. Disappointingly, the only thing the Society members, through their persistent questions about it, seemed interested in was the “poetic process”—and more particularly a process devoid of those nattering issues about race, identity, or politics. Toward the end of the discussion, an elderly white woman, clearly a senior member of the eminent Society, raised her hand and said, “Well, after listening to you both talk about your poetry, I’m wondering why we need to apply the name ‘Asian American’ to your poetry at all.” To my astonishment, at the time, both poets—both award-winning Asian American poets—agreed that the term “Asian American” as it’s applied to their poetry or to them as poets, felt limiting if not downright debilitating.

Such a response has its precedent. It’s reflective of the conundrum of the ethnic writer: how to keep from falling into the binary of either writing to a prescribed aesthetic steeped in a history of political ideology or writing as a fully realized individual shaped by an accumulation of discrete, personal experiences. It ‘s a false binary, of course, as a number of Asian American poetry anthologies have already shown, from The Open Boat: Poems From Asian America, edited by Garrett Hongo, to Premonition:The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, edited by Walter Lew, and Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation edited by Victoria Chang. All three anthologies rally around the diversity of themes and poets as opposed to a unifying call to some singular identity and community. Though anchored from a historical perspective to linear coordinates such as identity construction and political ideology, Asian American poetry is not bound to those coordinates. It is a fluid, changing body of work in time and space.

For me, what stung in the discussion panel with the two Asian American poets was not just the reluctance of either poet to engage the theme of the panel. It was more the shrugging of the shoulders, the all too quick surrender when confronted with the very raison d’être of the term “Asian American” in the little time they actually did spend in reluctant engagement with it. “It’s not for me to say,” seemed the consensus response. For that, too, there is a historical explanation, if not a rationale. Those two Asian American poets from the “Asian American Poetry” panel a decade ago were exemplary of Asian American poets who were moved toward more traditional and complex (i.e., Euro American) poetics reflective of what literary critic George Uba, in a seminal essay, describes as a “loss in faith in the efficacy of language as an agent of social reform or reliable tool of representation.” The cutting edge of contemporary Asian American poetry, according to Uba, had become “Post-activist.” As in the three Asian American poetry anthologies I mentioned earlier, Post-activist Asian American poetry is no longer so easily categorized or defined by theme or by audience. Today, the notion of “the Asian American community” out of which earlier Asian American poetry was generated, and to which it refers is considered antiquated, imaginable only from past exceptions like the haiku clubs of early Japanese America, the senryu poetry of issei internees, Chinese language poems published in early San Francisco Chinatown newspapers, even the poems written on the walls at Angel Island—that is, when geographic centers of Asian America were easily locatable, if not entirely legislated. With the growth and diversity of Asian American poetry have come varied centers, multiple margins, mixed race identities, and a nostalgia that focuses as much outside the US as anyplace within the nation state.

Conversely, Bao Phi’s poetry is unabashedly and unwaveringly all about being Asian American in the old activist sense of the term. In Sông I Sing, Bao Phi has something to say about being Asian American and an Asian American poet, and he says it in one astonishing poem after another. Phi was raised and educated in Minnesota, in the Twin Cities, and during the time of that Asian American Poetry panel was, for the most part, unknown in the world of Asian American Poetry even as he was rising strong and fast in national Slam competitions. In its manifesto-like tone and its uncompromising declarations of identity, Phi’s poetry is highly reminiscent of early Asian American movement writing—think Janice Mirikitani and Nellie Wong, Wing Tek Lum, the writings from Roots: An Asian American Reader, and the seminal Preface and Introduction to Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, edited by Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong—that tradition of ethnic coalition writing from which, presumably, many contemporary Asian American poets have either grown away or cannot relate to. By the crude yardstick of “Asian American literary sensibility” employed by the Aiiieeeee! editors, Phi’s poetry measures up and then some. The very dedication of Sông I Sing, “for my Asian American people,” evokes nostalgia for that bygone era as much as it is an homage to his audience.

The sense of urgency and immediacy in Phi’s poetry, the fluid flux and street cadences of his measures, carry over from his years as a seasoned and acclaimed Slam poet and his innumerable spoken word performances. At his performances, Phi’s audience is always present, their reactions palpable. They are his “tribe,” to coin a term from Russell Leong in his reference to the reading audience for Asian American poetry from the movement era—in community and in sync with him as he speaks to their sensibilities in his own inimitable style. It’s the physical presence of an audience that sets a performance poet apart from a purely discursive poet, and it is against that backdrop that Phi spent his formative years practicing poetry. His tribe(s) (“my Asian American people”) are always there, must always be there, for the final draft. George Uba reads the tribalism, in discursive Asian American poetry, as an ethnographic signifier of resistance to an oppressive and dominant culture, as anti-assimilationist, as privileging the oral over the written, and as more embracing of the polemic than the poetic—all descriptors that resonate through Bao Phi’s poetry and from which many contemporary Asian American poets were in retreat by the time Uba’s essay appeared in the early nineties.

However, the very first poem in Sông I Sing makes you realize that this collection, as much as it evokes the fist-held-high militancy of the movement era, is not simply a throwback to the past, and that Phi will not cleave to formulaic expressions of ethnic pride. Sông I Sing focuses on Asian Americans who are for the most part absent from the movement years—Vietnamese, Laotian, Hmong, Himalayan, Tibetan, Korean, South Asian, Arab Americans—and whose stories unfold in what would have been unimaginable places to those movement writers (the hardscrabble multiethnic Phillips neighborhood in Minneapolis and other ethnic epicenters of the Twin Cities, which until recently was noted as one of the most racially segregated metropolitan regions in the nation). The opening poem, “For Us,” extends the book’s dedication into a paean for those characters who fill, or will turn, the pages that follow:

This is for you, Celestial, Oriental, Asian, Asian Pacific American, 
Woman, Man, Queer, broke, collegiate, young old gook, spitting chink,
 Dog-eating dothead, faggot bitch slope. . . (1)

My people, we are a song that we can never stop singing against the silence
. My people, we are a song that we can never stop singing against the silence (4)

Songs, indeed, but not à la Whitman’s celebrations of the Self or the Open Road. These are counter-narratives from the streets that arise long after Whitman’s Democratic Vista has been overtaken and commandeered by rapacious institutions bent on global capital and exploitation and racial hierarchies that have been naturalized into a national lexicon: “haunting mouths taunting gook, chink bitch, butch, dyke, communist,/ feminazi,/ how people can call you by so many names/ yet see so little of you” (“Cleats Crowned by Soil”). Phi gives voice to the disenfranchised and displaced in his “refugeography,” to those who battle quotidian racism and who fight to keep from internalizing it to the point at which they cannot see themselves beyond those words: “They called us gook, chink, blanket ass, spic, nigger, coon—/(and what was really sad is, we called each other that, too)” (“Called, An Open Letter to Myself”). These slurs recur throughout the collection and there is no inuring oneself to them the more one reads them. Their sting is always fresh and there is no intent to reclaim or to reaccommodate them.

Indeed, they are terms that mark and illuminate processes of disenfranchisement that continue on both micro and macro levels. His speaker in “Fusion,” one of a series of character poems from the section entitled “The Nguyens,” serves up, with trenchant wit, the hypocrisies of white hipsters at a chic multiculti Asian/Latino fusion restaurant in Minneapolis where customers and proprietors gainfully deny “any allegations/ that a white restaurant cooking fake Asian Latino food/ could be racist” (25), while in a poetic missive, re-worked from an earlier version, ["and"] entitled “Dear Senator McCain,” Phi’s speaker continues to call out the senator for his shameful plying of the slur “gook” to garner presidential votes: “Senator/ what’s the difference/ between an Asian/ and a gook/ to you.” A decade since the earlier version was written, the senator, like the restaurant schmoozers, still seems not to know or care if there is a difference.

A clipped, smiling, stoic façade describes the quaint and unthreatening nature of “Minnesota Nice,” a passive-aggressiveness stereotypical of a non-confrontational demeanor, and a quirk of pride among many Minnesota residents. It’s an image that was momentarily shattered by the racist and statewide broadcasts of KQRS morning show DJ Tom Barnard, who, in 1998, admonished the Hmong community to “assimilate or hit the goddamn road,” a warning he also issued by way of complaint about the growing Somali community, and for which amongst other casually racist, sexist, and homophobic banter—alternating with the beat of seventies rock—the radio station garnered the largest audience of listeners in the state. The “American dream” of the subjects who occupy Phi’s poems, cornered in urban pockets of middle America, quickly transmogrifies into the existential panic of constantly being seen before they are seen, of being marked as easy scapegoats who shoulder the blame for high crime rates, low performing schools, challenged economies, and a receding quality of life for White middle Americans who are seeing their job opportunities shipped overseas. These cultural and racial markers quickly harden to become the borders that Phi’s personae are expected not to transgress and to which they themselves are expected never to call attention: ”Minnesota Nice: this city hides its scars well” (95).

In his poem “8 (9),” Phi recounts and contemplates the questionable police shooting of a Hmong teenager named Fong Lee. Despite the valid objections raised by the marginal community of concerned voices outside the investigation, the authorities refused to see anything questionable about the incident; the verdict seemed firmly resolved in their eyes before the trial began:

4.

An all-white jury found Officer Anderson not guilty of using excessive
 force.

Put a blindfold on me

tell me who you fear

and I will tell you

your skin. (94)

For the speaker, it becomes all too predictable, an unpalatable cycle of history that unwinds painfully, a tragic and familiar story heard over and over:

8.

All our lives, men with guns.

Chased, in the womb, in the arms

Of our parents.

 

Our parents

Chased, all our lives,

By men with guns.

 

In the womb, in our parents’ arms

We’ve run

Chased by men with guns.

 

(9).

Michael Cho. Cau Thi Bich Tran. John T. Wiliams

Tycel Nelson. Oscar Grant. Fong Lee.

May your names be the hymn

wind that sways

police bullets to miss. (95)

The people in verse (9) are all victims of police shootings—a Korean American man in Orange County; a Vietnamese American woman in San Jose; a Native American man in Seattle; an African American man in Minneapolis; an African American man in Oakland; a Hmong man in Minneapolis—and Phi has made their names into chronotopes, correlatives of time and space, where each singularly and arguably wrongful death becomes yet another iteration of what it is to live with the ramifications of being chased by men with guns. Indeed, it is only a partial list.

Sông I Sing also rings with poems of love and unforgotten friendship, tributes to otherwise invisible immigrant parents, humanizing portraits of those who have lost or are losing but nonetheless growing up wiser in the face of existential despair. Phi gives voice to those who live beneath the radar of the American creed, but who have internalized that creed as much as the quotidian racism they endure. His people struggle and laugh, fight, dance, sing and, in the last poem, like a Springsteen finale, go “race-ing” in the street.

As Phi has commented, Sông has more than one interpretation. It is Vietnamese for “river.” These poems wind through the heart of two cities like the river that borders them. Like the fabled Mississippi River that originates in upstate Minnesota, these poems are also origin stories of souls grown deep like the river, lives cast against a backdrop of often implacable whiteness. Phi’s poems emanate a sense of place. The recurring racist and sexist slurs provide the backdrop of intolerance against which those identities take shape. Minnesota is an overwhelmingly white state, and though the Twin Cities offers a modicum of relative diversity, the fact that well over half the state’s population lives within the seven counties that comprise the Twin Cities dilutes that diversity to a staggeringly small, even if continually growing, demographic. Yet within the last decade Minnesota Asian American writers and artists have reached national audiences—poets Ed Bok Lee and Sun Yung Shin, memoirist Jane Jeong Trenka, playwright Rick Shiomi, Hmong writer and editor Mai Neng Moua, photographer Wing Young Huie to name but a few. Many of the writers from Seeds From A Silent Tree, a seminal anthology of writing by and about Korean adoptees, were raised and reside in Minnesota. The Twin Cities is (or in some cases was) not without its artistic venues of expression for Asian American artists—Paj Ntaub Voice, Korean Quarterly, Asian American Renaissance, Theater Mu. All of these artists write with unique vibes that resonate with Phi’s, with each other’s. They are artists whose humanity was forged in the same unique crucible of place.

So what would any of those artists have had to say at that Asian American Poetry panel a decade ago? Even David Mura, a national literary luminary and de facto poet laureate of Minnesota Asian American poetry (who was not in attendance at that poetry panel a decade ago), feels the pinch of the binary. “We need then,” Mura has written, “to recognize a real diversity in our reading practices, a reading which acknowledges our living within a multicultural and postmodern world, where the centers are illusory—though occasionally useful—fictions, and where margins exist everywhere we look.” Conditions, more so than evasive definitions, of “Asian American Poetry,” are as much constructed upon its reading as its writing. Perhaps the best we can do is to “dance an attitude,” to use Kenneth Burke’s phrase, of Asian Americanness before the work, instead of opting to sit out the dance altogether. Or perhaps Eleanor Telemaque Wong summed it up best back in 1978: “It’s Crazy to Stay Chinese in Minnesota.” But if you do, imagine the songs you’ll sing.

* * *

Since 2004, Greg Choy has been a faculty lecturer in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. From 1998-2002, he was an assistant professor of humanities at the University of Minnesota, General College, and from 2002-2004 he was an assistant professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul , MN.

LIGATURE STRAIN

YELLOW YELLOW

In typography, a ligature is the conjunction of two or more letters into a single glyph.

In typography, an index is a punctuation mark indicating an important part of the text with a pointing hand.

Margaret Rhee’s Yellow/ Yellow and Kim Koga’s Ligature Strain meet in a typographical terrain of conjugation and decomposition, where fists appear in the margins. These texts saturate their pages to such a degree that I wish these words could stain my fingers—pink, brown, yellow.

These works are first chapbooks for both Koga and Rhee, and are #5 and #6 in Tinfish Press‘ yearlong Retro Series. Since April 2011, one chapbook has been released per month, each designed by Eric Butler.

In Ligature Strain it’s winter; in Yellow / Yellow I want to believe it’s spring. In the way that Koga lays down planks of text and then proceeds to gnaw, Rhee threads Tila Tequila and her father’s ashes, nectarines and arithmetic with critical discourse on race and gender to index the margins.

fi typographic ligature (via Wikipedia)

In the title poem, Rhee’s ligatures of “yellow” and “yolk,” “yellow” and “net,” “yellow” and “butter,” “yellow” and “cunt,” “yellow” and “other” become single gestures, single imprints. Koga’s blocks of text appear as rudders, rungs and slats, creating structures of strangulation and suture that “file practice rant,” “pilot up a hill” and “loll and roll like glass misbehaving.”

Koga is talking about baby beaver fetuses; Rhee is talking about radical feminism and queer sex. Their textures and colors conjoin and birth poems of the body. I am reminded of Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt-Ups (Tender Buttons, 2001), a feminist re-figuring of the male form of the “cut-up” and the male realm of porn. The rodent on the cover of Bellamy’s book might live well in Koga’s structures, as it might be indexed by Rhee, somewhere between “Pussy” and “Public/Private spheres.”

Dodie Bellamy's Cunt-Ups

In an excerpt in Stretcher, Bellamy writes, “I show you the photographs and they’re wet. I’m huffing as I’m trying to pack a considerable punch, I’m just going to think about it throughout, expelling a cloudy medium, faintly this time like we’re teenagers. I’m kissing you, emerging like a baby in fluid…”

These are wet texts. In Koga’s, placental goo and mucus drip and leak. In Rhee’s, snot, discharge and poo ooze and stain like yolk. Koga’s damp decomposition, fetal mouths, teats and webbed feet echo Rhee’s hybrid mesh of fruit and file downloads that is a correspondence of fleshes—their proximities flush and flash in the plural. “I pull my fingers through / and through” slips into “I drown   gulp   salt ashes & mermaid hair   the waves…” in Rhee’s ocean, while “the pink fleshes / squirm in shapes of congealed / raspberries” in Koga’s caves, wombs searching for release.

In the poem “Nectarines,” also published in the Spring 2011 issue of Kartika Review, Rhee splices cross-sections of historical research with the pleasure of the fruit. She examines the Korean American “invention” of the nectarine, the peach with plum skin, and crosses it against her own Korean American identity. Her line, “The flesh is delicate, easily bruised in some cultivations,” performs a similar gesture as “The innards of lesbians are the same as yours” in “219% x (a+b+c) x A I R =,” what Rhee refers to as her coming out poem. Comings out are runts of the litter in Koga’s work: “brown oiled fur in / water to repel or release your pink child / into water or wood” and “…new pink fleshes float and wait / inert for birth.”

"Index Cuts" (via callumjames.blogspot)

In “Index: A Poem About Sex,” Rhee builds personal and socio-cultural points of reference into a den where Koga’s beaver babies might “echo locate” or “paw and gnaw.”

Foucault, Michel, 88, 98, 2002, 100,000,000
Family, 000
Fiona lightly touched my cheek, 27
Femme, 578; see also beautiful femmes of color …
[...]
Identity, 1-100,000,00
[...]
I saw her in West Hollywood playing with Glow Sticks, it was then I knew I was gay, 77
[...]
Lawrence versus Texas, 265-66
Loving Lydia was my biggest mistake and my greatest dream, 105
Loving versus Virginia, 45, 98, 100,000,999 …
[...]
Yellow, 6, 57; see also Yellow Fever, Yellow Cunt, [nu rang nu rang], and why does someone in my seminar / respond to my poem by drawing an Asian eye?

In this last entry, Rhee might also have listed “Yellow Apparel: When the Coolie Becomes Cool” (2000), a short film made by UC Berkeley students that “explores the commodification and appropriation of Asian cultural elements into mainstream America and examines the effects of this trend on Asian Americans.” Interwoven into the film is footage of Anida Yoeu Ali performing a piece that was recorded with the spoken word group “I Was Born With Two Tongues” on the album Broken Speak.

Excuse me, ameriKa
I’m confused
you tell me to lighten up
but what you really mean is whiten up
you wish to wash me out
melt me in your cauldron
Excuse me if I tip your melting pot
spill the shades onto your streets
I don’t want to lose my color [...]

(Anida Yoeu Ali/I Was Born With Two Tongues, “excuse me, ameriKa”)

Rhee ties a suture around the color yellow until it stains everything that comes into contact with it. Pink, brown and gray strain to surface behind the black and white of Koga’s scaffolds:

a scintillating beaver she was—she
sheds her skin her skin pink and
new streaked with blood and left
without its protective fur. a whole
molting process for winter and each
season the pink comes through.

the pink fleshes attach and drink mothers
milk from your pink teat bits of red
blood cells pass too. pink gums and gray
lidded eyes paw and gnaw.

pink squirming fleshes and new pink skin
streak your blood and appetite.

These books break the skin and streak the appetite. Spines spill. Outside, it’s raining. Inside, I’m surprised that my hands are still dry.

* * *

Koga and Rhee’s chapbooks can be purchased online at www.tinfishpress.com. Subscriptions to the entire Tinfish Retro Series are also available for $36.

Two Works by Ronaldo V. Wilson

A Guest Post by Stephen Hong Sohn, Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University

Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Manby Ronaldo V. Wilson | U of Pittsburgh Press 2008 | $14

Poems of the Black Objectby Ronaldo V. Wilson | FuturePoem Books 2009 | $15

Stephen Hong Sohn

In this review, I discuss Ronaldo V. Wilson’s Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh Press 2008) and Poems of the Black Object (FuturePoem Books 2009). Wilson’s first full-length poetry collection might be more specifically described as prose poetry, as implied by its title. There are really no formal line breaks throughout the collection, so one is forced to consider what makes such a work poetry as opposed to prose. This genre-defying work’s title also clearly derives inspiration from two canonical African American literary texts: Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. In Wilson’s title, there isn’t any mention of the word “slave,” but the impulse to explore the conditions of subjection and domination are still very much there. Wilson’s work thus seems to enact a neo-slave “poetic” as derived through the queer racial minority’s subjectivity. The reference to the “brown boy” and the “white man” in the title also helps situate what actually occurs in the prose poetry blocks throughout the collection. “Brown boy” suggests that the lyric “I” is a mixed-race subject and likely an adult, but clearly one who does not have much access to economic resources. He is engaged in a homosexual relationship with “White Man,” someone likely older and with clearly far more money than the “Brown Boy.” Racial difference, class difference, and age difference, among other such distinctions, generate the rubrics of power and domination that mark the tension between “white man” and the “brown boy.”   Wilson’s work is raw, dense, and does not shy away from difficult topics, as demonstrated by the following excerpt, which is fairly indicative of the stylistic impulses of the collection:

“Go Shower. This command reveals [the brown boy’s] relationship to the white man. He follows his lover’s orders like a slave without anything but the promise of being fed and shown a movie” (64).

Poems of the Black Object continues the project that Wilson starts in Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man. Again, the central issue at stake is a kind of enslavement, mediated by the intersections of race, sexuality, and late capitalism. One stylistic approach that Wilson employs masterfully is the juxtaposition of “high” and “low” cultures: references to Shakespeare appear alongside references to Little House on the Prairie. Wilson also continues to use the “prose poetic” aesthetic that appears in his first collection, but also branches out and explores a variety of different styles, some more avant-garde in approach and others with a more traditional lyric quality. Yet the signature rawness of Wilson’s lyrics, which never shy away from the awkward or potentially vulnerable moments faced by the lyric speaker, remains constant throughout the text. In “Construction of a Black Poetic Self in Four Narratives,” for instance, the lyric speaker explores the complications of a mixed-race heritage through the bodies of his parents:

In a box, my father’s torso is
in a white thermal rib top
(my
own face leaning in to find
my face
in his black shiny skin)
between my mother,
a then fattish Filipino girl,
with a cinched waist is
the speed
at which she trained
to run off
excess flesh (58).

What I find especially interesting here is Wilson’s use of abrupt breaks. Does the shortness of these lines sonically and metrically augment the sense of rupture suggested here? Wilson’s focus on skin is particularly instructive in teasing out his exploration of race, but the racial identifications at work in this excerpt seem to operate asymmetrically. The lyric speaker finds the father’s body more tangible, something that can be explored, but the mother’s body is something in flight, running away.

A poetic of mixed-race seems to emerge here alongside the asymmetrics of parental lineage.

One of my favorite excerpts in this entire collection comes from “The Lesson”:

“Side B: aesthetic theory—Your skin is pink,
then opaque, caramelized then burned
if you are one of the drumsticks
stuffed in a bowl, as in a holocaust.

NY Times, East Timor. A blown-apart leg unskinned,
a shoe’s sole ripped back to bone, synonym
for torso in a soccer shirt.

This is ours. We are pickled,
you with me this strange leg.
Should I turn the chicken over?

See your life as screenic,
think collage,
ethnograph—He is your brown body.
Eve
the bone and scrape out the marrow
for marinade” (94).

As always, Wilson is able to engage provocative juxtapositions—in this case, generating a kind of poetics of the grotesque. The reference again to skin reminds us of the thread of race and racial formation that moves throughout the collection. What I appreciate most about this passage is the way in which global politics infests and infiltrates everyday activities such as cooking and consumption. The lyric speaker is aware of his unique privilege, one that does not let him prepare foods without thinking about how the act engages him in a type of metaphorically-inflected cannibalism.

I will definitely be teaching either or both of these collections in the future. I appreciate their inventive formal aesthetics and their dense, politically complex lyricism. And I always, always appreciate any collection that stretches the bounds of Asian American poetics.

* * *

Stephen Hong Sohn is an Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University.

bough breaks

bough breaks by Tamiko Beyer | Meritage Press 2011 | $12.50

The title of Tamiko Beyer’s first chapbook, bough breaks, evokes not just the creepy nursery rhyme, but also plant metaphors and motifs running through the poem-sequence. On the very first page there is “deep moss,” “bloomer,” and the “instinct” that “rises / late” from “whatever field”: whatever it is, this field has conceptual dimensions as well as spatiality. Shortly thereafter, the narrator tells us, “I construct syllabic fields,” suggesting with the simple present tense a habit, a pattern, perhaps something involuntary—and in this field, language itself, like foliage, must be attended to “like watering.”

These language-pastures seem to have once in the past(oral) contained the narrator until this instinct, to be a mother, escapes—pretty much like a protuberance—and causes a being-body to leak through. Queer desire is already a transgression, “chaotic.” By challenging the narrative that queer sexualities are non-reproductive, the maternal instinct turns the queer body excessive over and above its already-excess.

bough breaks seeks to interrogate this protuberance, this leaking, and its limits. It is fuelled by yearning: “will there be / between us a darling?” Yearning pushes through the body of the poem in the form of white space. Forms are invented to strike off authorized definitions of conception (biological as well as artistic), to prefigure the politics of a queer couple raising a child so as to question gender (“we would ….  open mother to repetitions”), to consider how options for child-getting are often embedded in contexts of violence and capitalistic greed (and is there really a choice), to destabilize both the “natural” and the “not natural” in “queer” and “motherhood” (and sneaky iterations of everything in between), to circulate even more questions around adoption and embryo adoption (check out that play with “play” and “pay” on page 24!).

Repeatedly, the sly, fluted precision of the poems (“we drift through rooms of thefted / antiquity”) is voiced over by something smeary and glittery (reminding me very much of the Aswang’s uprising in Diwata):

and if by invisibility they mean they do not see us
our bows and gnashing teeth
our prom dress feather boa heels
hair glittered gray the fisting and holler
fishnets fishnets breasts breasts breasts
our voices pitched forward into reclamation
the blood in our mouths sweet slick
like our ready-to-take-you between our legs—
. . .
our diy manicures all silvery and chipped
our shouts so lovely so lovely all that licking

Sections of the sequence travel back in time, in memory and in stories, to Beyer’s growing-up years in Japan. A child “tucked into the sled” gapes “at the sky’s star-dense orchestra” and a kind of loopy, tender narrative suggests itself. Is it the orchestra that transmits (a cunning build-up!) the next nonsense-like, charming section with re-ordered words from lullabies?—it begins:

spice went birds
gonna back silver sugar
the crown was pie and ashes and me

Mama’s three silver shells
birds light if tails
I’m a very nimble buy

Another skid in time, and there’s a collective fall off the bike (give you a “chin gash shin gash”—clever tongue-twister chant!) and the narrative picks its scabs only to stick them to the pavement.

All through, the text maintains community and solidarity with “bodies and histories as ragged / as ours but not as privileged.” A certain perspective on the plant motifs, we learn, can purpose the divine: “that’s god: green pulsing.”

Perhaps it is the plantal divine being supplicated in the last section: “Will you come to excavate the pile I have crawled under and cannot / bear to leave?” Or is this “you” future child, or possible futures, or possible future-selves, or self-in-the-present, or memory, or this poem-sequence, or language, or poetry—or is the intervention to be on the part of readers, collectivities? By opening itself up to possibilities of “rescue” through any or all of these apertures, the sequence submits to a vision where the past, present, and future come together to refashion the cultural logics it is questioning. Curiously, it ends with this instruction: “If I am quiet, I might know what the body means without words.” This “quiet” does not seem to be a vacuum; it seems to be filled with information, leaks, for the narrator, and—I would say—for Beyer’s intentional communities (queer, Asian American, urban, transnational). This goes back to the idea of surplus which, through its transgression of boundaries, has the potential to bring about change. Or is it a death-wish, a refusal on the part of “I” to be rescued and extricated from the heap, this inside not-outside? Or, as Iris mused in an email to me this morning: “Is this a prophetic vision?  Or a contemporary trance/hallucination in which traumas of loss and longing and be-longing might be worked out?  Or something else entirely?”

What is spit, taken as the title of Esther Lee’s first book of poetry? It can be derogatory, can be DNA and genealogy, can be sustenance and suckling, can be used to form or deform the sounds we make when speaking. The poems in this collection are preoccupied with the mouth, which functions as a site of stagnation just as much as change. The book begins, “When asked if I believe in absolute truths, I cite the lie.” And a few lines down: “Our mouths were stretched to the floor as punishment . . .” In another poem, the mouth is a “rusted hollow,” an irreparably broken car muffler. Later, in “The Real World Is Like This,” the sound of a mother’s “bird-throat” suggests flight, then suggests the clicking sounds of the speaker’s tap shoes driving a rift between her and her sister and, she says, “what my mouth can’t afford.”

Astonishing for a first book, Lee’s signature style is instantly recognizable by the accent she creates visually on the page. The front dedication to her family reads: “I kiss one hundred time[ ].” Generally brackets tell of absence, which can mean revision, loss, or a truncated excess—and in these poems refer to text as much as to personal experience. In the dedication, it is a nod to her parents’ accent. In the “Interview with My [C]orean Father” poems, the bracketed “C” reclaims and reshapes an ethnic label. It also points out how arbitrary are such naming practices, since Corean and Korean sound identical. In “We Are the Happiest Children in the World” and “Ivan / Ivan,” brackets proliferate lines to evoke at once caesura and transition, as we see in:

I tell you I am here mingled [ ] with snow
yellow-white as the page [ ] I suckled from
my grandmother—strange mother—and I [ ] grew

These brackets have a distinct flavor from backslashes, m-dashes, and ellipses; they are a ligature of grammatical pedantry (showing Lee in command of the language) and ungrammatical familiarity (an intuitive, poetic experimentation). They are a punctuation that Lee has made uniquely her own in these poems.

Another trademark is Lee’s blank missives, also the title of her first chapbook and interspersed throughout Spit. The opening poem is titled, “Dear __________cate,” and signed, “Yours, / __________cate.” These symmetrical blanks suggest epistles sent from one unfinished self to another, or between variable selves. They also invite the reader to participate in meaning-making. Some blanks require an obvious part of speech: __________est, __________phobic. Some suggest a theme or emotion: __________quito,  __________pling. Others can be difficult to fill in, like __________eam, and resist the standard proportioning of suffixes. Part of Lee’s play is appropriating the English language and making it her own.

“Tongues for ‘Typhoid Mary’ ” unexpectedly thrusts Mary Mallon into a wordplay of difficult English sounds, including consonant clusters that might be mispronounced by an immigrant: “freshly fried / flying fish, shredded Swiss at sixish. Truly, rurally.” Together with limerick-quick rhymes, Lee’s technique makes a fable out of Mary Mallon. Historically, she was the first known healthy typhoid-fever carrier, and the cognomen “Typhoid Mary” today conjures malignant ignorance and a refusal to cooperate with officials for the “greater good.” Her story is also one of alienation and quarantine, all for the crime of inhabiting her own body. She even changed her name to Mary Brown, hoping to blend in. In Lee’s poem, Mallon’s immigrant background is subtle but present: “Eyeing her Irish wristwatch, she winced since / no selfish shellfish could ease her mood.” The enjambment is telling.

Lee’s sly command of the language sometimes borders on evasion of plain statement; in other words, poetical occlusion. But behind the trumpet of her poems one can usually hear a gasp of breath, a human frailty and voice. And I wonder if her poetic vision is not unlike Mallarme’s, who wrote of the difficult poet: “he hesitates to divulge too brusquely things which do not yet exist; and thus, in his modesty, and to the mob’s amazement, he veils them over.” These subdermal poems roil in family and experience, and get under your skin even when refusing a nominalist simplicity. They feel more than tell; they do more than mean. Take, for instance, the poet’s interviews with her father, which begin as a back-and-forth exchange, then fragment across the page until the conversation meets a gorgeous incoherence. In the third interview, the speaker asks, “Then why stop playing soccer?” and the father answers, “I met you dressed as a bumblebee. My arms fit / around like a honeycomb.” To which the response is: “The leaking / fish market boxes.”

This first book of poems astounds the immigrant narrative. In Spit, we learn that protest and testimony are insufficient lyrics of an older generation; yet, neither are these poems sounding the mechanical jazz of language poetry. Spit is concentrated voice, kaleidoscopic narrative. Expect this poet to impact the present generation, to unveil the lies we tend to cite—which no longer suffice.

Mouth by Lisa Chen | Kaya Press 2007 | $13.95

The cover image of this square-shaped book previews the poems well. It’s a photo of a brick tenement bombed with graffiti wildstyles in suburban browns and blues. One letter’s tail stretches generously through a sill in the wall to become a finger flipping us off. Someone has abandoned a road bike in front of the wall and a plain plank laid out like a welcome mat. Reading these poems is an experience of urban ekstasis, an out-of-body splash of sight that stops the pedestrian reader. Lisa Chen sprays up the walls of poetry to show where our grammar and vision have gone dry.

What a wonder it is to see the world through Chen’s language! We see a “face filling the night like a bare back / Turned away from you in sleep.” The look on another’s “as I leave is a porch light left burning at dawn.” And a woman whose “English isn’t so good. Slang, her mouth the color of turned salmon.” Chen writes in “Translators’ Apologia,” “I have tried to approximate a sea with a stream of piss” and that approximation itself opens an astonishingly vivid world. Her phrases seize with naked incisions.

The collection’s tone is set in the opening title poem, “Mouth.” The speaker is in a situation, literally and figuratively, “where [she doesn't] speak the language.” The spoken word is stifled yet emergent, gritty and gnarled, as we see variously in lines like: “cocktail boozer slurring the voila delirious,” “the shill slag of bad guitar and motel ashtrays,” and “the sloe-eyed, two-fisted mouth” among others. The speaker resorts to body language, “hands thrust in the air / in grim universal gestures” which translates here to bartering at the market, a game of demonstrating desire and the ability to walk away.

Estrangement—more specifically, strangers in urbanity—is another theme taken up by these poems. “Crossed Signals” is a missed connection at a 24-hour buffet: “Believe me when I say my mouth longs to utter what it does not know: your name.” In “Things That Are Distant Though Near” we blink through quieted observations—makeup on a face, a schism in relationships—while talk goes on, largely unheard and, in these poems, unrecorded. Similarly, loquacity in and out of context composes poems like “Quote/Unquote,” “I Didn’t Always Look This Way,” and “Chinese Ghost Stories” which is a found poem of spliced quotations.

Human injustice demands a global scale in “Human Interest” and “Study for a Border Killing.” In the former, “When you say genocide, my mind goes blank. Numbers are a dumb sum.” For crimes to be non-abstract, that is to say not dumb, there must be an audience, complete with a “take-home message” and a rhetoric of narrative detail. But the poem closes with a tinge of cynicism as the speaker says, after listing atrocities with perverse curiosity: “I think you’re onto something. I’m with you.” In “Border Killing,” we are treated to similarly exquisite detail, but a single interjection, “His family—was this what you wanted to know?—called him Junie,” makes stark the rhetoric of sympathy. I read in this a political dissatisfaction with both cold facts and rosy-warm pathos. It may be of interest that Chen has a history in journalism and also co-authored a book entitled The She Spot: Why Women are the Market for Changing the World and How to Reach Them.

Lastly, if one is to go on making crude categories, a number of these poems address Chen’s background and interest in the Asian American immigrant experience. The second poem of the collection, “The Old Widow,” hushes together the silliness (perhaps eeriness) of modern people and the anachronistic grandeur of ancestor worship. “Songs of Gold Mountain” embeds lines from the Angel Island poems into new soliloquies This is followed by “Parachute Girls,” which disenchants the American immigrant dream stereotypes three girls from Taipei, Seoul, and Hong Kong. Among other qualities explained to us, we are instructed: “You can get them to do just about anything because no one tells them what American girls do” and “They swear at you in their language because the dirtiest words are the ones you are born with.”

Despite (maybe because of) the acuity and talent in this collection, I’m left with a vaguely disappointed sense that Chen is skirting personality. Except in poems like “The Old Widow” and “Seven Chinese Brothers” there is no identifiably personal “I.” This is not the result of an objectivist and disengaged attitude; rather, the often terse and oblique syntax, the prismatic fragmentation of self as subject, seem to be an avoidance or dismissal. Sometimes it feels like watching Wallace Stevens doing a crossword puzzle, putting up his finger not to be approached. This may say more about my aesthetic and philosophy than Chen’s, but these poems in all their virtuosity make me wonder how many personal risks they took. Nevertheless, I’m surprised that this debut collection hasn’t received more attention since its publication in 2007, and I do recommend it—for the poet’s frequently astonishing urban vision and her equally astonishing translations thereof.

Editor’s Note: Interested in reading Mouth?  Enter our Prompt Contest for a chance to win a copy of your own.  Many thanks to Kaya Press for their generous sponsorship.

Burnings by Ocean Vuong | Sibling Rivalry Press 2011 | $12.00

Ocean Vuong’s first chapbook of poetry, Burnings, is a searing elegy to a deceased motherland that continues to smolder in the memories of those who left her in the wake of war. Although Vuong is a member of the 1.5 generation (the children and infants of Vietnamese refugees with scant memories or no memories of that armed conflict) his writing boldly confronts, grapples with and reflects themes of personal and political dissolution and regeneration.

Do not say our names as this flame grows

from the edge of the photo, the women’s smiles

peeling into grimaces, the boy spreading slowly

into black smudge, filaments of fire

dissolving into wind. No, do not say our names.

Let us burn quietly into the lives

we never were.

[from "Burnings"]

What comes forth in the title poem is the shock of tangible, catastrophic loss. It gives you the feeling of being gradually burned down to a nub, leaving behind only a trail of stoic grief, and in order to get on in life and persevere you must transcend it.

An apt Mark Doty epigram divides Burnings into two sections, but the transformative medium of fire is the theme that runs throughout the chapbook. As I read Vuong’s poems, I imagined each one warping and crinkling in my hands, heating up my fingers, as if someone had lit a match at the corner of the page. The slow burn of Vuong’s verse and his juxtaposing and melding of life and death give off sparks in the dark that illuminate truths which one never truly forgets.

The martyred, yet truly luminous, mother figure appears often in Vuong’s sorrowful, yet engaging, lyricism. Seemingly blessed with the role of carrying and bringing forth human life, the mother figure in the poem “My Mother Remembers Her Mother for Le Thi Lan (1941-2008)” is not weighed down with any Mother Earth sentimentality:

There are men who carry dreams

over mountains, the dead

on their backs.

But only our mothers

can walk with the weight

of a second beating heart.

When I read this stanza over and over, I started to notice the cycle of creation and destruction interwoven in the words. One could surmise that boys are born of women and they will eventually grow into men who are one day forced, or are willing, to kill the offspring of other women who could very well bear a resemblance to their own mothers. What could be worse than thinking that the “second beating heart” could grow into a murderer?

The father figure in Vuong’s poems is habitually absent, but not exactly, because he acts very much like a maligned shadow, ever-present, yet consciously skulking around on the periphery. In the poem “Song of My Mothers,” the focus is on the Vietnamese female subject and her travails during the war, but the incinerated husbands lurk in the negative spaces:

Of the wives who charged

into burning fields,

who knelt and scraped

someone else’s husband

into cracked jars of glass.

and as do the foreign fathers who, supposedly, leave behind illegitimate children in brothels, intermixing life and death:

Sing of the daughters

who surrendered their names

to the nights of Sai Gon,

whose bodies became bed frames

for men who touched breasts

as they would the top of skulls.

In the poem “The Touch”, which was published in the first issue of Lantern Review, the yearning for the absent father is especially prominent. This poem could be interpreted as two separate fantasies merging into one, as the mother mourns the absence of her husband and the boy mourns the absence of his father, while stepping into his shoes as he comforts his mother at night:

She softly exhaled as I pulled closer knowing

This was not right: a boy reaching out

And into the shell of a husband. …

Another major theme that Vuong plays on continuously throughout Burnings is song or the act of singing. When all seems lost, when one must leave the homeland without the comforts of home, a familiar tune, a folk song, is all one has that can recall fond memories or, unfortunately, remind one of what he has left behind and will eventually lose:

… Listen. Someone is trying

To croon that old song, but the voice cracks over words

Like Mother, Home. …

[from "Arrival by Fire"]

A song can also be an act of defiance and self-actualization in the face of social forces that seek the annihilation of a forbidden love or true identity:

As those fig leaves lay torn by our feet,

somewhere, someone was beginning to sing.

I had to touch my lips

to know that hymn

was mine.

[from "Revelation"]

Finally, possibly one of the most beautiful poems in this collection is “Gardening with the Son I Will Never Have.” It is a poem that deals with the inevitability of life and death and the natural state of existence. The poet seemingly splits into adult and child versions of himself in order to facilitate a conversation that has been inherent within father-and-son pairings for generations:

How do I explain

to the small boy beside me,

the difference between his skin

and the velvet shells of tulips?

On the surface, for the sake of scientific categorization, and cognitively speaking, humans and flowers are separate beings, although we both share the same air and ground on this planet. Essentially, though, we are very much the same. We are earthly organisms that will live and die; we both grow and then, over time, our bodies deteriorate until we can function no longer and, in the end, our molecular structures must return to the dirt.

That to press a finger into soil, we

are not too far away.

The title of the poem, “Gardening with the Son I Will Never Have,” very cleverly defines Vuong’s young life, which seems ripe with possibility but is highly attuned to his lived reality.

Ocean Vuong’s masterful poetry is something any literary enthusiast should experience. His poems share a worldly sadness that paradoxically recalls the joyful magic that can spring forth unexpectedly in life. Vuong’s words hold inside them a wisdom that speaks across and through generations of people who have suffered and then go on to persevere. Burnings is definitely for any reader who is looking to come in from out of the cold.

Barbara Jane Reyes' DIWATA

Diwata by Barbara Jane Reyes | BOA Editions 2010 | $16

In Poeta in San Francisco, Barbara Jane Reyes’ previous book, diwata was someone “elders say” had once “walked on earth” before the “the nailed god came” (30). These are the traces and rumors from which the titular Diwata of her latest book is resurrected. Then, like slippery oral art, like slips of the tongue, creation stories about men, women, and diwata—a god or spirit in Philippine mythology—are made up and told again and again. The poems in Diwata draw also on, and retell, Judeo-Christian creation narratives, introduced and enforced in the Philippines by the Spanish colonial regime. These retellings of myths and folk tales become a modality through which ahistory is rendered into history, history itself is investigated, and variations of diwatas, their quarries, and their hunters are revealed as inhabiting multiple narrative, linguistic, and cultural sites.

A globe our size, where migrations, displacements, and diasporas have become fairly common, and networked space-time has become a given for its globalized areas, is increasingly in need of transnational, translingual, transcultural mythologies. Diwata is one such transmission, in English, Spanish, and Tagalog. While most poems in the book take the form of story, it also has songs, couplets, pantoums that pick up the motifs of repetition and variation, creating a sinuous overlapping sonic rhythm.

Diwata inhabits many temporalities: it goes back in time before time and to the pre-colonial time and the colonial time; it stays in once upon a time and also strays in the present. By de-colonizing time from its linear, industrial, western model, it recuperates and liberates mythic, folkloric, and indigenous entities historically demonized and suppressed by the Catholic church and the Spanish colonial administration. The deep time of myth and folklore in Diwata is not static; rather, it is like static, a kind of oracular interference that sharpens the reader’s awareness of acts of wounding as well as acts of resistance performed during Philippines’ colonization, first by Spain and then by the USA.

The cast of characters that perform these acts (and tell the stories) include the first woman, the bamboo (according to Philippine mythology, parent to the first man and the first woman), mermaids/sirens, Diwata, poets, mothers, daughters, old women, young women, aswang, she, I, we. Who tells the story is as important to understanding it as to whom the story is being told. The reader herself might be being addressed, and canalized, into some of the myths being recounted. Is this the reader about to turn into mermaid:

You are the dreaming girl who walks outside herself—

Then, the reader cannot hope to stay at a distance from or out of this text, to have the ‘other’ tell the myths and songs, to not be wounded, to not herself become deity, demon, priest, storyteller.

The two strands of myth—indigenous and Christian—come together in the book when Eve demands of Diwata, Muse, to “Remain with me so that we may keep vigil,” invoking:

a ceaseless, insistent we, the fiercest we, bound only to the knowledge of scars upon my flesh, and the segment of my spine which aches to sprout wings.

Connected to Eve’s un-surrendering are Reyes’ own mythicized alter egos: the first, a “strange deity” taunted by her eldest brother: “¡Bárbara! ¡Que barbaridad!” The second, Saint Barbara, is charged with protecting “us” from harm and she seems to be quite a lady:

Our lady of gunpowder,
our lady of bullets,
our lady of men deep in the earth. 

Connected to the shape-shifting Barbaras is the Aswang’s ghoulish battle-cry which climaxes the book:

I am the dark-hued bitch; see how wide my maw, my bloodmoon eyes,
And by daylight, see the tangles and knots of my riverine hair.
I am the bad daughter, the freedom fighter, the shaper of death masks.
I am the snake, I am the crone; I am caretaker of these ancient trees.
I am the winged tik-tik, tik-tik, tik-tik, tik-tik; I am close,
And from under the floorboards, the grunting black pig,
Cool in the dirt, mushrooms between my toes, I wait.

But of course “this story lacks proper symmetry.” Symmetry is an anthropometric concept historically deployed to control and regulate the criminal, the unhealthy, and the mentally deficient; i.e. those falling within the wrong racial, ethnic, or socio-economic category.  Diwata, who is  all three, must choose asymmetry, and her storyteller too cannot, indeed must not, be symmetrical. Thankfully, Reyes knows this.