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.

Stephen Hong Sohn

This May, as part of our celebration of APIA Heritage Month, we have been asking teachers and writers of Asian American poetry to share favorite writing exercises with us.  This week, in acknowledgement of the fact that the work of reading and theorizing Asian American poetry is as important as the work of writing it, we’re changing things up a bit by adding a perspective from the world of literary criticism to the mix.  For today’s Curated Prompt, we have the privilege of collaborating with one of our regular guest contributors—Asian American Literature scholar and Stanford professor Stephen Hong Sohn—as he writes about one of his aesthetic interests and shares, for the very first time, a sample of his own (hitherto secret!) creative work.

Alexis Kienlen’s She Dreams in Red begins with my favorite kind of poem: the “food pornography” poem, which immediately problematizes issues of authenticity and Asian American identity. The lyric speaker often contemplates ethnic heritage as routed through her mixed-race background. What does it mean to so unabashedly crave ethnic foods, the lyric speaker seems to ask?  What can one claim ownership over, and what can one not?

Here is an excerpt from the opening poem, entitled “Chinese Café”:

“i want to savour pork dumplings,
dribble hoisin, garlic and black bean sauce over rice,
want to twist and drip noodles into my mouth,
lick my lips” (11).

The ending of the poem leaves us with this line: “this Chinese café stays open all night,” and we, as voracious readers, couldn’t really be happier.

Marking ethnicity is always a challenge within poems, but many Asian American poets such as Li-Young Lee and Aimee Nezhukumatathil have been able to explore gastronomic tropes with much complexity, and often with much humor.  At once, we understand that food can mark ethnicity, but that it can also be deconstructed or employed to complicate superficial consumptive habits. Food also provides a particularly rich terrain of vocabulary. As someone who can’t cook myself, I find cookbooks endlessly fascinating and endlessly ethnic. Frank Chin once made a scathing critique of writers who employ food pornography as a way to mark themselves as native informants, but it’s difficult to know when excess is intended or not. For the purposes of this exercise, we’ll intend to push this excess, as Kienlen does when craving those “wontons” and “custard tarts” (11). Here is a food pornography poem I’d like to share:

Vietnamese food pornography poem #2: the sacred and profane

on this misted early morning
the haze ever so beta-particulate
japan’s nuclear crisis compared to Chernobyl
but culinary erotics distract me
the sensuous curve of the baked egg tart from Kang Lac
hand pressed pork puffs and steaming pork buns
so coy under the dim lights of Asian Garden Mall
Yum Cha Café boasts the understated elegance
of coconut crusted mochi balls with taro curd filling
flirtatious with such pliant, feathered skins
next door, Bánh Mi Saigon delivers me
into succulent hybridities: liver pâté, cold cut meats,
pickled carrots and turnips, all on French baguettes
postcolonial oriental cosmic

can i be so apolitically gastronomic
in these electromagnetic times
what intersections do i allow at Bolsa and Magnolia?
vendors at food stalls gesture in Vietnamese
frown, furrowed brows, shrugged shoulders
i profess that i am purely Korean
retreat into a bustling noodle shop
where my psychic sukiyaki emits a spectral glow,
brains scrambled in sinewy ramen, measured in sieverts
tripe floats on radioactive, soupy currents
bulgogi strips infesting this curry-flavored broth
as i later salt my phở with iodine and wasabi

Now, let’s see your version of a “food pornography” poem.

Prompt: write a poem that engages greedily, lasciviously—even pornographically—with the sensual pleasures of consuming “home” or “ethnic” foods in order to challenge, reimagine, or push familiar culinary markers of ethnicity into the realm of playful excess.

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

Shin Yu Pai's ADAMANTINE

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

Adamantine by Shin Yu Pai | White Pine Press 2010 | $16

Adamantine, as the title reflects, is a collection filled with luster, gleaming with deep insight, and further characterized by an ethereal landscape, focused on emotional connections, on spirituality, on death, and on the afterlife.  Pai’s work travels both within and outside of ethnic and racial frames, thus complicating any transparent categorization of the collection as “Asian American” literature.

Stephen H. Sohn

Nevertheless, the political character of many of her poems does make Adamantine speak to many of the field’s traditional concerns.    I begin this review further into the collection, with what I believe is the larger project of the work.   In “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Vulture,”  Pai’s lyric speaker considers the responsibilities of one who chronicles the lives of others:

eye
of the witness
the I of the commentator

grubby children at the rim
of a Guatemala dump
stunned orphans in Russia (76)

The homonyms of “eye” and “I” function in different contexts, both on the level of ‘one who watches’ and ‘one who speaks.’ The following lines accordingly consider the issue of witnessing, with respect to the plight of global poverty. What is the responsibility of the lyric speaker, Adamantine continually asks, with respect to voice and sight?  In that vein, I’d like to concentrate on one of the overall lyric approaches that Pai takes, which is to place current events and historical figures in comparative perspective.  As part of Pai’s relational approach, the collection opens fittingly with an epigraph from Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost.  The passage from which Pai excerpts refers to prayers and mantras and explores how such spiritual inscriptions speak to individual loss and to aesthetic beauty.  At the same time, by invoking Anil’s Ghost, Pai sets Adamantine firmly within a tradition that queries human rights and global conflict.  Perhaps we are not surprised, then, when we find that the first poem’s title is “This is not My Story,” as if to immediately query the autobiographical impulse of the confessional lyric.   The lyric stories of “Adamantine” are often those of Asian or Asian American figures who move beyond the speaker, including Thich Quang Duc in “Burning Monk,” where the lyric speaker repeats, as a kind of mantra, “his heart refusing to burn / his heart refusing to burn / his heart refusing to burn” (19).  Of course, Thich Quang Duc is most famously known for his self-immolation in protest of the Vietnam War.  The use of the word “heart” arcs out across this collection.  We are reminded in the very first poem, “This is not my Story,” that the “human heart is / a wholly different animal, / we must sense when to give in / before the other gives up” (11).  The importance of emotion and affect imbues the lyric speaker with a kind of power, leading her toward a pathway that involves spiritual reawakening.  Another figure invoked is James Kim, the Korean American who died tragically when he and his family were caught in a winter snowstorm in Oregon. The lyric speaker gestures again to loss, but contextualizes his death within the frame of sacrifice, as James had attempted to situate help for his family despite the possibility that he could have succumbed to the austere weather conditions.

One of the most deliberate and fascinating sequences within Adamantine is the successive poems “Model Minorities,” “Requiescat,” and “Body Worlds.”  Pai’s lyric speaker first invokes the lack of recognition that mental illness receives within Asian American communities, especially as it was exposed during the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings.  “Model Minorities” is, not surprisingly, the poem that most clearly evokes Asian Americanist themes, focusing on the damaging expectation that Asian Americans maintain a perfect, salubrious, and mentally agile image.  In “Requiescat,” the lyric speaker purposefully juxtaposes two events in terms of their impact on a university campus: the court hearings of Amanda Knox and the death of In Soo Chun.   While the lyric speaker points out that Amanda Knox’s hearing receives much more attention from media outlets, In Soo Chun’s death requires remains unmourned:

I find his name
the death of a 61-year-old
immigrant laborer

won’t make headline news
unnamed in the UW Daily,
I find his identity in The Stranger

learn he was assigned
to the Ethnic Studies building
to empty trash baskets

scrub toilets, mop floors
when no one is looking

I lie down to sleep (71).

Here, the lyric speaker is clearly perturbed by the focus on Amanda Knox as opposed to this custodial worker, who is apparently so unimportant as to not merit a mention in the university paper.  What I appreciate here, too, is the irony of his death within the Ethnic Studies building, which gives us the sense that even within such a location, his life does not necessarily bear increased importance, as he works at a time when “no one is looking.”  The sense of uneasiness faced by the lyric speaker is most clearly related by the break in the tercets that occurs with the line, “I lie down to sleep.”  The line is haunting in the way it references death as well as in the kind of disappointment that the lyric speaker experiences at having had to witness another overlooked life.  The next poem, “Body Worlds,” clarifies yet another level of erasure through its poetic consideration of the notorious museum exhibit, which was critiqued for the way in which the cadavers were acquired:

knee joints replaced
with steel, corpses

stolen from mental hospitals
the undocumented bodies

of the executed, bullet holes
found in a specimen’s head-

quartered in Dalian & Krygystan
the humanity of bodies stripped

of skin, fatty tissue, age & eye color (75)

The lyric speaker constructs the human being as one who possesses a specific and individual existence, rather than as a generic representation that can only be understood through a skeletal or muscular structure.   Humanity is thus “stripped,” as a fully configured and contextualized life cannot be denoted from what remains in those exhibits.  Adamantine opposes this stripping effect continually and effervescently.

Pai ends with yet another stunning poem of biographical scope entitled “Double Happiness,” which twines together the marriage of Bao Xishun, who is considered to be one of the tallest individuals in the world, with Kim Bong-Seok’s “reunion with his father.” Kim Bong-Seok, otherwise known as Toby Dawson, won a bronze medal in moguls at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin.  That Pai’s collection ends on this felicitous note returns the reader to the many significations of the word “heart,” so that we leave the lyric terrain within the bounds of familial and romantic love.

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

A selection of offerings from Tupelo Press's list

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

Stephen H. Sohn

In an earlier post, I had the chance to discuss the exciting growth in Asian American cultural production via the small press, especially as it has impacted poetic projects and publications.  In this post, I’d like to concentrate on Tupelo Press, another small press that has developed an outstanding catalog which includes both Asian and Asian American poets.  Among the offerings in Tupelo’s current catalog are:

Night, Fish, and Charlie Parker by Phan Nhien Hao (translated by Linh Dinh)

Abiding Places by Ko Un

Ardor by Karen An-hwei Lee

Why is the Edge Always Windy? by Mong-Lan

At the Drive-In Volcano by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Miracle Fruit by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

In the Mynah Bird’s Own Words (chapbook) by Barbara Tran

In this post, I will concentrate most specifically on Barbara Tran’s In the Mynah Bird’s Own Words, Karen An-hwei Lee’s Ardor and Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s At the Drive-In Volcano and Miracle Fruit.

Tran’s chapbook is one that I have chosen to teach for my Introduction to Asian American Literature course.  What I find so breathtaking about Tran’s work is her clarity of image, which always imparts a precise sense of a given moment or time through its use of lyric.  The chapbook also has a clear sense of lyrical trajectory.  The earlier poems seem to be invested in rooting out heritage and ethnic origin, especially as rendered through a growing romantic relationship.  The latter poems dig more deeply into the diasporic trajectory.  It is here where the chapbook becomes more autobiographically inflected.

Karen An-hwei Lee’s Ardor is a curious collection, described on the book jacket as having a “lyric postmodern aesthetic,” but I suppose I would disagree from this phrasing, only because it does not have the slippage that I generally associate with postmodernism.  If anything, the murkiness of Ardor stems much more from an impressionistic approach in which geography, temporality, and lyric voice cannot always be firmly situated, even though there are clear semantic clusters that delineate the collection’s thematic unity.  These clusters include: a focused attention to religion (e.g. references to Christ, the Bible, etc), geometry (cardioids, circumference, curves), medical vocabulary (the medical names for bones like radius and ulna) and terminology (atrial flutter, arrhythmia), and fruit (kumquats, pomelos).  The opening page of Ardor is instructive in helping the reader to think about the semantic landscape that so richly texturizes Lee’s lyrically conceived world:

As a child I knew how to sketch this
Graph a cardioid around plotted
Birds from real algebraic equations
Conversation images of empirical scent
I slipped this dream out of its own skin
Put its shape inside a bottle, this one
Joined it hands to prayer, this one
Jin wei first tone fourth tone
Merged rivers of contrasting hues
One opaque, the other clear (9).

Here, we already see the importance of geometry to the collection, but in this case the speaker considers the subject through a kind of translation.  Certainly, this situates Lee’s poetic as interlingual, since “real algebraic equations” can somehow roughly estimate the shape and morphology of objects such as “birds” and hearts (a cardioid adorns the cover of the collection).  As the lines continue, dreams are said to have a “shape” that is then placed “inside a bottle,” and literalized and collided together into different tonalities, different colors, different transparency levels.

Lee does invoke a unique structuring device that leaves the reader relatively grounded, too: she structures various blocks of the collection in prayers, dreams, and letters.  At one point, toward the conclusion of the poetry collection, the lyric speaker asks, “How does a Song dynasty poet/ Relate to this Western/Female poet of Asian lineage” (65) and we seem to get a sense of the project engaged by “this Western/Female poet of Asian of Asian lineage,” who perhaps routes the influence of the Song dynasty poet in her movement Westward.  This diasporic lyric is especially important to the way that Lee conceives of race relations:

In the ladies circle
White women said
You would have been
A good house slave
Because you can stitch
She owned that property
On this and such avenue
Burned to the ground
A white woman
In the ladies circle
Everyone knew how to stitch
White women, prejudiced
Slave hands with fine hands
I did the stamp collection for them
When I could still see, parting one
From same, their bleached faces
In profile, intaglio, cameo
Placed each one in books
Albums with little pockets
Never understood why
White women
So often photographed
Used bleaching cream [end of 34]
Hydroquinone
Isn’t white
White enough (35)

Repetition continually brings the reader back to the racialized gaze, as the “white women” are apparently not “white enough.” The slippage and the impressionistic quality of the collection as a whole leave one ungrounded as to where and when this particular lyric “scene” might be taking place.  One gets a sense of propriety and class — a group of “white” ladies in a parlor room perhaps — and the repetition of the word “slave” generates tension that places whiteness up against African American oppression.  The lyric speaker presents these ladies with an attitude of apparent puzzlement: race already ordains such women through a specific kind of phenotypic privilege and yet, the lightness of their skin must be further enhanced to the extent that one wonders when they might be satisfied with their supposed “whiteness.”

Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s two poetry collections have been a delight to read.  Her poems have a witty and often funky edge to them as evidenced by her second collection’s title — At the Drive-In Volcano — which I think is absolutely hilarious and perfect in terms of the book’s general theme of poetic heartbreak.  Rather than the drive-in theater, we’re at the drive-in volcano, where we sit down to watch the emotional outpourings that occur in the wake of a long-term relationship gone awry.  If there is an arc to the two collections, it would seem that Miracle Fruit is more about possibility and potential, while At the Drive-in Volcano leads us more toward the pessimistic and the problematic in romantic relationships.

One of my favorite poems in Miracle Fruit takes “fruit” literally, using it as a prop in the background of a lyric “scene” in which the speaker regrets having turned down a cherry farmer’s offer of a date:

The Woman Who Turned Down A Date with a Cherry Farmer

Fredonia, NY

I was dusty, my ponytail
all askew and the tips of my fingers ran, of course, red

from the fruitworms of cherries I plunked into my bucket
and still—he must have seen some small bit of loveliness
in walking his orchard with me.  He pointed out which trees
were sweetest, which ones bore double seeds—puffing out
the flesh and oh the surprise on your tongue with two tiny stones

(a twin spit), making a small gun of your mouth.  Did I mention
my favorite color is red?  His jeans were worn and twisty
around the tops of his boot; his hands thick but careful,
nimble enough to pull fruit from his trees without tearing
the thin skin; the cherry dust and fingerprints on his eyeglasses (24).

The language here is so lush that we understand the speaker’s deep regret, even though the farmer is a perfect stranger, offering up a tour of his orchard, to perhaps someone who is on a New York vacation.  Nezhukumatathil’s poetry is felicitously rendered, and has a musical texture that threads her lines together. Take for instance, the lines: “he must have seen some small bit of loveliness / in walking his orchard with me.  He pointed out which trees were sweetest, which ones bore double seeds.”  Here,  Nezhukumatathil employs alliteration of the “s” sound, first in “seen some small” and later in “sweetest” and “seeds.” We also get assonance in “seen,” “me,” “trees,” “sweetest, and “seeds,” as well as consonance in “must,” “bit,” “pointed,” “out,” and “sweetest.”  Such sonic clusters are not unique to this poem, but can be found throughout the collection.

The concluding poem from Miracle Fruit interrogates Nezukumatathil’s admittedly unwieldy surname:

My Name

In New Guinea, to identify a person’s family, you ask,
What is the name of your canoe? My seventh grade
social studies teacher made up a dance to help him
remember how to pronounce my name—he’d break it

into sharp syllables, shake his corduroyed hips
at roll call, his bulge of keys rattling in time.
I don’t remember who first shortened it to Nez,
but I loved the zip of it, the sport and short of it,

until the day I learned Nez means nose in French.
Translation: beloved nose.  My father tells me part
of our name comes from a flower from the South Indian
coast.  I wonder what it smells like, what fragrance

I always dabbed at my neck.  Scientists say some flowers
don’t have a scent, but they do—even if it’s hints of sweat
from blooms too long without drink or the promise
of honey from the scratchings of a thin bee leg, feathered

with loosestrife and sage (73).

Here, again, I would call attention to the playful quality of both the sound and the lyric images, whether in this line that shows some internal rhymes, “but I loved the zip of it, the sport and short of it,” or in the mental picture of the teacher who literally “shakes” out the speaker’s name.  The teacher’s physical movement reminds us of the way in which  Nezukumatathil consistently integrates music and dance into her poems’ sonic choreography.

I mentioned earlier that At the Drive-in Volcano primarily finds its footing in poems about the heartache of a broken relationship.  One of the poems that I would argue best dramatizes some of the unexpected collateral “damages” of a broken relationship is “Dog Custody,” which negotiates the custody battle that can arise over the pets who have come to be defined as pivotal to the conception of family:

Dog Custody

But after we broke up, we couldn’t make choices
regarding who gets to see him without being mean.
I can’t sleep in the dark.  What are those scary noises?

What about the Sundays we left him to rejoice
at church?  Can you forget how you leaned
toward me in love, how you sang faith’s praises?

In my car, I found one of his frayed old leashes
from the last time at the park—he came back unclean.
He barked at the geese, a cloud of winged voices.

You win.  I give up—he always listens to you best: chases
squirrels, but never returns.  If a new girl comes, I’ll turn green.
When you fall out of love, you make silly choices.
Three hundred miles away, I still hear your voices (21).

Nezhukumatathil makes continual use of the villanelle throughout At the Drive-in Volcano, as if the poetic form might be able to contain the chaos that arises out of her speaker’s trying personal circumstances.  The villanelle is a difficult form not only because it requires a very specific set of line repetitions, but also because its tricky rhyme scheme can result in the production of an overly repetitive and hackneyed poem.  Nezhukumatathil texturizes “Dog Custody” by slightly changing the lines that must be repeated, all the while relating the precarious attachments the speaker has made to her pet in the course of her relationship.

I will end my consideration of Tupelo Press with an excerpt from Nezhukumatathil’s poem, “Oriental.”

Oh this is the perfect ruby, O from the velvet you can’t see, O my goodness, what big eyes you have, considering your mom is Filipina, O my goodness, how light you are, considering your father is Indian, O egg roll, O general Tsao’s chicken I cannot eat with chopsticks, O how I love dim sum (39).

This poem the introduces the intricacies of a mixed-ethnicity background that can be mapped onto Nezhukumatathil’s own heritage: she is Filipina-Indian (South Asian) American.  As an “Oriental,” or one who can claim multiple ethnic heritages, the poem’s lyric speaker challenges any claims to authenticity, joyfully proclaiming her love of Chinese food, while admitting, “I cannot eat with chopsticks.”  The poem’s humor succeeds through its repetition of “O,” an invocation that affords an almost divine status to the racialized and ethnicized images being addressed.  One is reminded of Frank Chin’s concept of “food pornography,” which Nezhukumatathil claims with disobedient lyrical abandon.  Whether interrogating racial identity, the date that never was, or the pet she cannot forget, Nezhukumatathil’s collections are a real treat.

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Stephen H. Sohn is an Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University.
To find out more about Tupelo Press, please visit their web site at www.tupelopress.org.

Some Offerings from Four Way Books' List

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

Stephen H. Sohn

In thinking about the so-called state of contemporary Asian American poetry, I am most struck by the issue of the proliferation of small presses that have remained afloat through print-on-demand publication policies and through the strategic limited print-run system.  American poets of Asian descent have certainly been a beneficiary of this shift as evidenced by hundreds of poetry books that have been published within the last decade.  In 2008 alone, there were approximately 20 books of poetry written by Asian Americans, the majority of which were published by independent and university presses.  Of course, on the academic end, the vast majority of Asian American cultural critiques, especially book-length studies, have focused on narrative forms, but the last five years has seen a concerted emergence in monographs devoted (in part) to Asian American poetry, including but not limited to Xiaojing Zhou’s The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry (2006), Interventions into Modernist Cultures (2007) by Amie Elizabeth Parry, Race and the Avant-Garde by Timothy Yu (2008), and Apparations of of Asia by Josephine Nock-Hee Park (2008).  As a way to gesture toward and perhaps push more to consider the vast array of Asian American poetic offerings in light of this critical shift, I will be highlighting some relevant independent presses in some guest blog posts.  I have typically worked to include small press and university press offerings in my courses, having taught, for example, a range of works that include Sun Yun Shin’s Skirt Full of Black (Coffee House Press), Eric Gamalinda’s Amigo Warfare (WordTech Communications), Myung Mi Kim’s Commons (University of California Press), Timothy Liu’s For Dust Thou Art (Southern Illinois University Press).

In this post, though, I will briefly list and consider the poetry collections by American writers of Asian descent that have been put out by Four Way Books (New York City), headed by founding editor and director, Martha Rhodes—and will spend a little bit more time discussing Tina Chang’s Half-Lit Houses (2004) and Sandy Tseng’s Sediment (2009).   Currently, Four Way Books’ list is comprised of:

Tina Chang’s Half-Lit Houses (2004)

Pimone Triplett’s The Price of Light (2005)

C. Dale Young’s Second Person: Poems (2007)

Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan’s Shadow Mountain (2008)

Sandy Tseng’s Sediment (2009).

Were I to constellate the commonalities between these five collections, it would be clear that the editors at Four Way Books are very committed to the lyric approach to poetry, in which the connection between the “writer” and the lyric speaker seems more unified.  I have taught Pimone Triplett’s The Price of Light in the past, specifically for my introduction to Asian American literature course.  What I find most productive about this collection is its very focused attention on “lyrical issues” of the mixed-race subject.  In The Price of Light, one necessarily observes how distance from an ethnic identity obscures any simple claim to authenticity and nativity.  In The Price of Light, a lyric speaker returns to one vexing question: what does it mean to be Thai?  To answer this question, the reader is led through a unique odyssey, where issues of poetic form, tourism, and travel all coalesce into a rich lyric tapestry.

C. Dale Young’s The Second Person: Poems continues the exciting poetic trajectory envisioned in his first collection, The Day Underneath the Day.  I am especially energized by Young’s texturizing of the lyric landscape through the consideration of Caribbean geographies, ones that complicate the notion of the “American” in Asian American literature.  Further, the inclusion of medical vocabulary, no doubt influenced by Young’s work as a physician, uniquely stylizes his poetry, offering a heterogenenous semantic terrain that is breathtaking and wide-ranging.

Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan’s stunning debut, Shadow Mountain, reminds me of the importance of the “latency” affect that has structured the appearance of Japanese American literatures concerning the internment experience.  It is not unlike Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Beyond Heart Mountain in this regard, and the lyrical excavation important in contouring how the internment continues to reach across generations.

I’d also like to consider some specific poems from Chang’s Half-lit Houses and Tseng’s Sediment.  One of my favorite poems from Half-Lit Houses appears early on in the book; I reprint an excerpt here:

Invention

On an island, an open road
where an animal has been crushed
by something larger than itself.

It is mangled by four o’clock light, soul
sour-sweet, intestines flattened and raked
by the sun, eyes still savage.

This landscape of Taiwan looks like a body
black and blue.  On its coastline mussels have cracked
their faces on rocks, clouds collapse

onto tiny houses, and just now a monsoon has begun.
It reminds me of a story my father told me:
He once made the earth not in seven days

but in  one.  His steely joints wielded lava and water
and mercy in great ionic perfection.
He began the world, hammering the length

of trees, trees like a war of families,
trees which fumbled for grand gesture.
The world began in an explosion of fever and rain.

He said, Tina, your body came out floating.
I was born in the middle of monsoon season,
palm trees tearing the tin roofs.

Now as I wander to the center of the island
no one will speak to me.  My dialect left somewhere
in his pocket, in a nursery book (6).

This poem is largely instructive in the way that Chang continually subverts the nostalgic reclamation of family history and ethnic attachments.  The opening moves us into this framework with the graphic depiction of roadkill as a metaphor for the way that Taiwan itself might appear geographically, but we also know that this connection links itself back to the lyric speaker’s heritage.  The “Tina” of “Invention” is not born in the welcoming embrace of perfect weather, but in that of “monsoon season.”  It is no surprise then that her journey to Taiwan is itself replete with a sense of isolation, as “no one will speak to” her.  Tina’s father is posited as a laborer, but this force is one likened to “trees like a war of families,” and we begin to see the conflicts that will emerge throughout the rest of the collection.  For instance, in “Famine,” the readers are treated to a historically distant poem that situates the difficult conditions that structure the family lineage of the lyric speaker:

Famine
[Hunan, 1932]

Mother explains her love of heat
as she stirs over a burned pan.

We collect them one by one:
beetle, ant, june bug, roach, gnat, firefly.

The cow crumbles on its thin legs.
And the dust over a million eyes.

We let go of a handful.  Tiny black legs
spinning on a mound of sugar.

Let us eat, thankful for the small things
that wander by the window or a door.

We grasp what flits by us, flashing (35).

In this case, we recall the very difficult situation that reconstructs insects—not as some quaint local color—but as objects for consumption.   The lines here are indicative of Chang’s spare and direct lyrical style, which works at its best when disorienting the reader’s expectations.  I end my brief discussion of Chang’s Half-lit Houses with the intertextual lyric “shout-out” in “Stain,” where Agha Shahid Ali’s presence is made known.  I always find these moments fascinating because they point to a multiply inflected poetic teleology, where the influences of romantic poetry or American free verse must stand alongside Asian American poetry as its own specific subarea.  In “Stain,” reprinted below, the lyric speaker finds inspiration in an empathic connection to Ali’s poetry:

I read of Ali’s Kashmir, his country falling
beneath an elephant’s foot, the heaviness
that breaks the dry ground and the high cry
of an impending siren.  I want to tell everyone
of my alarm.  That I am afraid for them.
We must all admit what we fear in the lush
hazard of the waking heart, for what it wants
is to rest, a red flag hidden in uncertain
camouflage, to disappear inside a stupor fog (79).

Sandy Tseng’s Sediment is peculiar for the elliptical nature of its various poems.  Structurally, the first section mostly coheres around a themes of alienation and descent similar to the ones found in Chang’s Half-lit Houses.  As in Half-lit Houses, ethnicity never provides a direct mapping of identity and history:

Somewhere along the line,
a native entered the family
on my father’s side and left
his dark skin on us.

There are some things I’ve never asked

and always wanted to know.
The sound of rain tapping on tin
no longer soothes me to sleep.
We begin to adapt to our surroundings

but cannot give in completely.

It’s a task of finding
the right hole for the square peg
and not being able to fit it
perfectly into anything.

I imagine that my skin is not the color of fire.

When I am born, no one will fly me
across the ocean to raise me
in another country.  I imagine that
I am a round peg in a round hole.

The breath is being pushed out of my lungs

by the hands of something
unknown, the palms
pale as the sidewalks.
I imagine so many things (5).

Once again, the question of belonging surfaces through the oft-used metaphor, “the right hole for the square peg/ and not being able to fit it/ perfectly into anything” (5).  We are immediately led to think about the topic of miscegenation, as the opening lines tell us, “Somewhere along the line,/ a native entered the family/ on my father’s side and left/ his dark skin on us” (5), directing us again to descent and lineage.  Where does the lyric speaker belong?  Such questions continue to galvanize the poems’ openings.  Such is also the case with “From the First Generation.”

From the First Generation

The name I gave myself was altered by my parents’ accent.
The neighbors showed us how to spell it on a yellow notepad.

Our first Thanksgiving we cringed at the stuffed bird open and gaping
on the table.

We drank large glasses of milk everyday.  Our bones grew slender
and long, the height of a people increasing as our feet touched the land.

I have heard my mother come home late in the evening.  Some days
I could not wear the $40 sweater I begged her to buy.

There was a boy whose family hid in caves during the war, a man who
can still taste the C-rations he ate with a soldier.

We can never go back.  I’ve wanted to pack everything into a box, ship it
back overseas with a note explaining (9).

Here, the problematic of assimilation looms ominous over the immigrant family, where the child’s naming does not proceed seamlessly, and instead is “altered by” accent.  Perhaps, most salient to the recent holiday, Thanksgiving emerges as a day that constructs the immigrant family as other, where the object of consumption is “gaping,” rather than inviting.   Food therefore structures one way into the fabric of immigrant identity, where belonging might be accessed through ingesting appropriate dishes or drinks, but where one’s past cannot be escaped, as evidenced by the “man who/ can still taste the C-rations he ate with a soldier,” an ever present reminder that what one eats cannot be divorced from such complex culinary archaeologies.

In one of the most precise and crystalline poems from “Sediment,” Tseng’s “The Merchants Have Said It” recalls Chang’s “Invention” in exploring the way that a subject might find himself foreign to the very landscape with which he might claim an ethnic affiliation:

The Merchants Have Said It

In the courtyard, laundry dries in the aroma of fried fish
with a bit of garlic from someone’s fingers.  I hear
the voices from the alley.  The merchants have said it.
I am too tall.  Because somewhere I drank milk as a child.
And somewhere my face was not weathered
by Mongolian dust blowing from the north.  I hear the whispers
through the bed sheet curtains.  The way I hold my head
gives me away.  Although I cut my hair and buy clothes off the street,
still I walk like a foreigner.  My stride is too long, too quick.
But if I hide my fingernails and slouch, if I look no one in the eye,
someone will take the offered coins without a word (18).

There is the sense of the authentic local atmosphere, replete with the “aroma of dried fish” and the “voice from the alley.”  Even given her enterprising journey through this terrain, the lyric speaker has perhaps intruded, as she is still “like a foreigner.”  Interestingly, the poem ends on a note of shame, as the lyric speaker will not “look” anyone “in the eye,” so that any transactions might occur without challenging inquiries or the broaching of difficult topics.

In providing just a brief view into Four Way Books, my aim has simply been to highlight the exciting and innovative work being produced out of independent presses.  Of course, Four Way’s commitment to its poets continues, as Martha Rhodes has already contracted the future collections of C. Dale Young (Torn in 2011) and Monica Youn (Ignatz, April 2010), as well as the forthcoming collections of Tina Chang and Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan.

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Stephen H. Sohn is an Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University.
To find out more about Four Way Books, please visit their web site at www.fourwaybooks.com.