Three Diverse Poetry Anthologies to Teach This School Year

3 Diverse Poetry Anthologies to Teach This School Year: Cover Images of HALAL IF YOU HEAR ME (Ed. Fatimah Asghar and Safia Elhillo), INK KNOWS NO BORDERS: POEMS OF THE IMMIGRANT AND REFUGEE EXPERIENCE (Ed. Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond), OF COLOR: POETS' WAYS OF MAKING, AN ANTHOLOGY OF ESSAYS ON TRANSFORMATIVE POETICS (Ed. Amanda Galvan Huynh and Luisa A Igloria, Editors).
L to R: HALAL IF YOU HEAR ME (Ed. Asghar & Elhillo), INK KNOWS NO BORDERS (Ed. Vecchione & Raymond), OF COLOR (Ed. Huynh & Igloria)

A new school year is upon us, and if you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll know that we’re passionate about diverse books in the classroom. Anthologies are wonderful resources for teachers hoping to integrate a range of poetic voices into a curriculum, and luckily, 2019 has been especially bountiful in terms of new poetry anthologies and edited collections that feature diverse voices. Read on for three such titles that have caught our eye this year—and that we think would make fantastic additions to any classroom in the 2019–2020 academic year.

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Halal If You Hear Me
(Haymarket Books, 2019)
Edited by Fatimah Asghar and Safia Elhillo

In assembling Halal If You Hear Me, editors Safia Elhillo and Fatimah Asghar set out to create a space that celebrates the diversity of the Muslim community. In her introduction, Elhillo writes of growing up afraid of “performing my identity incorrectly.” Asghar, too, writes of her own longing for acceptance. In contrast to shame and alienation, the editors have envisioned Halal If You Hear Me as a space of solidarity and freedom—a testament to the notion that, in Elhillo’s words, “there are as many ways to be Muslim as there are Muslims.” It’s safe to say that the editors have roundly succeeded: from Kazim Ali to Warsan Shire, the broad variety of poetic styles and backgrounds represented in Halal If You Year Me span a truly impressive range, singing and grooving across genres and generations. Halal If You Hear Me would make a fantastic choice for a high-school or community teaching setting, where its broad accessibility would make it an inviting point of entry into poetry. College-level and graduate courses, too, would benefit from the inclusion of this vibrant volume in their syllabuses.

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Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience
(Triangle Square, 2019)
Edited by Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond

In a time where the notions of borders, migration, and citizenship are under constant scrutiny, Ink Knows No Borders seeks to highlight and celebrate the diversity that immigrant and refugee voices bring to the table. Write editors Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond in their introduction, “These lived stories, fire-bright and coal-hot acts of truth telling, are the poet’s birthright—and a human right. [ . . . ] Not only does ink know no borders; neither does the heart.” Indeed, this anthology sings with colorful narratives that bear witness. Featuring more than sixty poems that engage an enormous range of communities and experiences, the volume combines beloved favorites like Li-Young Lee’s “Hymn to Childhood” with more recent works like Aimee Nezhukhumatathil’s “On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance” and features a star-studded list of contributors that includes many of my [Iris’s] own favorite poets to teach—Joseph O. Legaspi, Franny Choi, Ocean Vuong, Alberto Ríos, Juan Felipe Hererra, Ada Limón, Bao Phi, and more. Ink Knows No Borders would be a wonderful text to teach in any high school or community setting or as an addition to any undergrad- or graduate-level reading list, while individual poems from the volume could also shine in the middle-grade classroom. To get you started, Penguin Random House, which distributes the book, has even helpfully provided a teacher’s guide to aid with introducing selected poems from the book to young readers.

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Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making
(The Operating System, 2019)
Edited by Amanda Galvan Huynh and Luisa A. Igloria

Born out of a student-teacher collaboration, this landmark volume thoughtfully collects together craft essays by poets of color—including numerous APA voices such as Ching-In Chen, Sasha Pimental, Ocean Vuong, and Craig Santos Perez. In keeping with the “windows and mirrors” principle, which proposes that students need to read texts that both offer glimpses into others’ experiences and reflect their own, Of Color tackles the need for diversity among not just primary works, but also among secondary writings on poetics, theory, and craft. In her introduction, coeditor Luisa A. Igloria recalls how the project came into being after a meeting when Amanda Galvan Huynh (who was then her student) confessed her frustration that “there was nothing in [her craft and theory courses’] syllabi or course reading lists that reflected who she was back to herself” (19). Indeed, the resultant volume speaks to a desire to carve out and create not just a resource—but a community. Writes Huynh in her own introduction, “To BIPOC writers: I hope you find what you need to hear in these pages, the support, the love, the struggle, and the reassurance that you are not alone in this poetic artistry” (16). A beautiful testament to the strength and importance of community, Of Color would be a strong addition to any undergraduate or graduate creative writing syllabus.

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What books that you encountered in school helped open your world to diverse voices? If you’re an educator, what texts have you loved for including racially diverse perspectives in your curriculum? Share your recommendations with us in the comments or on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram (@LanternReview).

Three New Collections that Sing the Hybrid Body among the Ruins

3 New Collections that Sing the Hybrid Body among the Ruins: Cover Images of MONSTERS I HAVE BEEN by Kenji C. Liu (Colorful text sans-serif text of the title overlaid on a comic-like image; Japanese characters appear beneath the English title), SOFT SCIENCE by Franny Choi (Image of a woman with pastel blue skin sheltering beneath a canopy in a cubist/polygonal mushroom-like, pink-toned landscape), ARABILIS by Leah Silvieus (Image of a barefoot woman in a pink chiffon gown; instead of a neck and head, pale pink flowers sprout from between her shoulders; one of her arms is raised and is watering the blooms)
L to R: MONSTERS I HAVE BEEN by Kenji C. Liu, SOFT SCIENCE by Franny Choi, ARABILIS by Leah Silvieus

Happy National Poetry Month! For our April roundup, we’ve selected three recent APA poetry collections that reflect upon the labor of vulnerability. These ambitious projects employ footnotes, coding syntax, Google Translate, and elegaic and pastoral forms to mine tenderness from the desert, tracing how tendrils may grow where no sun has touched, how hybrid bodies might emerge from our ruins. If you’re aching for sustenance in the midst of a barren season this month, we hope you’ll consider checking out one or more of these gutsy titles.

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Monsters I Have Been by Kenji C. Liu (Alice James Books, 2019)

Monsters I Have Been, Kenji C. Liu’s second collection, meditates on the wreckage left by histories of violence and domination. Fittingly, Liu deploys an original form in this book that he has dubbed “frankenpo”: juxtapositions of footnotes, musical scores, and lines in translation that can divine “new meanings often at odds with the original texts” (1). As Liu writes in “The Monstrosity: Notes Towards a Frankenpo,” the collection’s concluding essay, the frankenpo responds to the idea that “A monstrous presence is needed to respond to monstrous times” (82).

The resulting poems are both playful and rife with pain as they dismantle the bloody logic of imperialism and take apart the brutal performance of heteropatriarchal masculinity. Take “Footnotes to a Murder in the Third Degree,” a poem for Michael Chun Hsien Deng, who was beaten to death in 2015 while being hazed by brothers from his Asian American fraternity. Masculine identity defined by violence leaves the body of the poem, the mourned boy, absent. What remains are numbered fragments—”We broken brothers, tackling each other with belonging,” reads one footnote (22)—that gesture at the legacies of racism and cultural alienation that motivate cruelty as a mode of kinship. Monsters I Have Been calls for ownership, rather than abandonment, of history’s “indefensible monstrosities” as close as our blood relations: “What new bodies do we need in order to survive and live?” (90). Liu sows lines for new manifestos, for future modes of kaleidoscopic, intimate becoming; his monsters are “Not an attempt to create a new kind of man, but to grow a monster of compassion and ferocity” (88).

Soft Science by Franny Choi (Alice James Books, 2019)

Fears of AI domination revolve around the questions: Can machines think? Can robots become sentient? With glittering poetics, Franny Choi reminds us these are trick questions—the histories of machines and cyborgs have always been inseparable from histories of sentience. In her new collection Soft Science, Choi lends radical softness to ash, coral, cyborg, imaginary girl alike. All are just as vulnerable as we are to the specter of another animal’s rise, an animal that points to us and names us “animal / alien / bitch / stone” (15). Language, then, becomes the double-edged sword that Choi uses to probe moments of violence. In “Jaebal,” for instance, language manipulates and assaults; its failures give way to necessary quiet, a precious harbor and a parallel universe where the speaker is “hardening and bright and filling / my own room” (31), where language can be rediscovered as a tool for making sense and healing. In “The Cyborg Wants to Make Sure She Hears You Right,” Twitter harassment Choi received is run several times through Google Translate, resulting in lines like “flat face fetus,” “uppity, filthy immigrant girl,” and “I go back to my mudhole” (26)—so that the imperfections of layered automatic translation render hate speech as nothing more than a performance of power that falls flat. Just as language can inflict pain, Choi’s poems assert language’s ability to strengthen, to protect, to play.

It is fitting that the cover of Soft Science is a reprint of James Jean’s “Parasola,” a fantastical homage to photographer Ren Hang. When Ren took his life in 2017, he left behind his haunting photographs—of his friends’ nude bodies entwined with birds, pressed up against leaves—that articulated the messy, mutating, and mutilating world of embodied desire in a suppressive society. If Jean’s homage extends Ren’s world to create refuge in a pastel dimension, then Soft Science, too, enacts a process of returning from shelter to scenes of violence, reacquainting world with cyborg self—only this time, with a kinder yet more ferocious touch.

Arabilis by Leah Silvieus, (Sundress Publications, 2019)

In her first full-length collection, Arabilis, Leah Silvieus guides us through life and last breaths, allowing cycles of absence and abundance to unfold in lush lines. In “Field Dressing,” a father shoots a doe; his daughter holds its gutted heart “until it cool[s], then cast[s] it to the dogs.” In “Maryland Route 210 Elegy, Dusk,” the speaker reflects on animals struck by car, bodies curled “as if just borne / into the world” (34). And in an early poem, “So Blonde,” the speaker, a transracial adoptee, fails to will her hair into gold—and out of that failure, finds instead that her hair comes alive, “my horde of snarled darlings, so dark, so generous” (13).

Arabilis, sectioned by the turn of each season, is—as it must be—an exceptionally patient collection, one that observes how “abandoned long enough . . . a place becomes an elsewhere,” as Silvieus writes in “Parousia” (43). Through close observations of street debris, of wasp nests, of the strangling roots of a white swamp oak, Silvieus allows connective tissue to form between the reader and an always brutal, yet always tender, poetic world.

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What recent poetry collections have created new spaces for vulnerability in your emotional life? Share them with us in the comments or let us know on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram (@LanternReview).

Three Spring APA Poetry Collections That Reconstruct Kinship

3 Spring APA Poetry Collections that Reconstruct Kinship: Cover Images of THE YEAR OF BLUE WATER (Yanyi), Mitochondrial Night (Ed Bok Lee), and ANYONE WILL TELL YOU (Wendy Chin-Tanner)
L to R: THE YEAR OF BLUE WATER by Yanyi, MITOCHONDRIAL NIGHT by Ed Bok Lee, ANYONE WILL TELL YOU by Wendy Chin-Tanner

This month’s poetry round-up features three collections that consider and reconstruct restrictive notions of family, kinship, and relationships. Whether through essayistic reflection, dialogue, or lullaby, the poems from these new works scrutinize the power structures that normalize destructive ways of relating to one another while holding dear the people who can see us with clarity and compassion. We hope these books shed light on the people in your lives who enable transformation, as well as on the poetic techniques that can bear witness to intimacy.

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The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi (Yale University Press, 2019)

“I thought that having myself was not supposed to take any effort” (31), writes Yanyi in one passage of The Year of Blue Water. Like many of the passages in the collection, this paragraph is arranged in the center of a page, as though the speaker himself stands in the middle of a hushed room, addressing his listener candidly. This tender dialogue is essential to the speaker’s transformation throughout the collection. “I have no control of my family,” the speaker writes. “They may leave me; I accept that.” What continues despite of (or rather, because of) the pain and violence of rejection is the project of reconstructing self and identity—possible only because of the constellation of chosen kin in literature and life who can, and will, listen and respond to the speaker.

The difficult transformation at the heart of Year of Blue Water honors bell hooks’s redefinition of love—as “an action rather than a feeling”—in order to emphasize, assume, and honor the accountability and responsibility required of love. For this reason, there is an enchanting affinity between The Year of Blue Water and Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights. Just as Gay commits himself each day to finding a “new delight” to discover, exercising his “delight muscles,” Yanyi commits himself to a type of love that recognizes the intentional activity and labor necessary for loving. Love as feeling, as bell hooks has written, has often been “the stuff of fantasy”; if being queer, trans, and Asian only heightens the incongruity of fantasy and reality, then the action of love must always depend on the act of seeing self and other clearly. The concision of Yanyi’s craft paradoxically speaks to how clarity is a process rather than a state to be achieved—each terse sentence builds on the one before, layering meaning upon meaning. “I am worth the work of transformations,” Yanyi writes. “As in, I do not fear how I will emerge from myself, or how many times” (57).

Mitochondrial Night by Ed Bok Lee (Coffee House Press, 2019)

It seems passé to place Ed Bok Lee’s recent collection within the lineage of travel writing, a genre that by now has been exposed and condemned for its often imperialist and colonialist ambitions. But the literary history of travel writing is also full of spectacular and critical turns, thanks to work by Monique Truong, Bani Amor, and Karen Tei Yamashita, among others, that confronts the legacies of empire, decolonizes tourism, and repurposes the genre to gather up communities forcibly split and scattered.

Mitochondrial Night is a dazzling continuation of this project. In “Metaphormosis,” for instance, the speaker’s mother describes traditional harvesting techniques “not of Korea, or Corea, or North Korea, but Chosun” (5); like the shifts in names and borders for Myanmar or Czechia, this story becomes a journey through kingdoms and imperial transitions that “forced a hiccup in my mother’s recollection” (5). Everyday details, as well as familial lineage, serve as carriages for travel—an “aluminum soda can” (57), “A distant Amtrak” (60), “your thumbnail” (81) are all opportunities to reflect on interconnectedness through sustainable exploration. We need not rely on gas-guzzling jets and or further the destruction of local ecosystems in order to connect to others or see our own home and history more clearly. Quoting an unknown source, Lee writes, “Life is like photography. We develop from negatives.” Recognition of our own lives and our connection to others is not built via casual voyeurism and exploitation but, rather, through untangling the power relations that continue to define people and place, all the while tending to histories of self, other, and home.

Anyone Will Tell You by Wendy Chin-Tanner, (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019)

Former LR staff writer Wendy Chin-Tanner’s Anyone Will Tell You is a strikingly musical and melancholic collection that makes much with very little. Many of the poems are careful arrangements of two or three words in each line—a sparse form that Chin-Tanner developed after the birth of her second child. The direct and dynamic relationship between life and art, child and parent, is central to the project of this collection.

For instance, “Index” unravels in fits and starts, line by line: “I confess // I hungered,” the speaker tells us, before recalling, “wait this is // a poem” (14). Interruptions like these force the question: What is a poem, and who holds power over this definition? These questions prove crucial when a pivotal confession arrives several lines later:

“wait I should

say how I
tried to have
another

and it died” (15).

In the context of the emotional turmoil and the social stigma surrounding miscarriage, infertility, and the female body, Chin-Tanner’s poetry reveals its power as an aesthetic object. As a stunning site of stuttered rewording, Anyone Will Tell You rephrases the alternately devastating and wondrous experiences between self and other that have been scripted by and made unintelligible by exclusionary norms. In Chin-Tanner’s lyrical recursions, silence reemerges into language that holds, rather than abolishes, the unpredictable experiences of self and body. As she writes, “all i could do was make / my eyes see and not blink, and not look away” (30).

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What poetry collections have shed light on or transformed your relationships with loved ones? Share them with us in the comments or let us know onTwitter, Facebook, or Instagram (@LanternReview).

Review: Luisa A. Igloria’s THE SAINTS OF STREETS

The Saints of Streets by Luisa A. Igloria | University of Santo Tomas 2013 | $17

the-saints-of-streets

“Hokusai believed in the slow / perfectibility of forms” (3), begins Luisa A. Igloria’s newest book of poems, The Saints of Streets. She has been writing a poem a day since 2010, a project archived online and from which this collection was born. Given how prolific she is, I could not help but find in these opening lines a reassurance that the poems collected here are not merely practice but are a practice. For perfectibility, the poem goes on to say, is “the way, // after seventy-five years or more, the eye / might finally begin to understand / the quality of a singular filament—” Indeed, this is a book of single filaments, and in these poems are so much delight and wisdom, often beginning in the mundane but nearly always spiraling inward to the sacred.

We see this spiraling quality first of all in the poems about place, which is one of what I’ll call three clotheslines bending with this collection’s poems: clotheslines, I say, because of the quality the poet gives to everyday activity, weighted with meditations even as it flutters in the wind. The place poems nod most pronouncedly to the collection’s title. In “Repair,” for instance, we begin in the present moment: “Almost at the alley’s elbow, I know the gate . . .” (9). Shortly after that, we move to the wistful past tense, each sentence beginning “There used to be” as a litany. Just as we first graze the alley as a kind of body, so does the speaker name the ghosts of objects as though in mortal lament, counting down structural losses, strippings, and repairs along with the absences of people. But the magic of this poem is in its concluding grammatical shift. See how, in the last three lines, the past tense makes way for something closer to the timeless:

across the south wall, even on the night the child
ran out the side door with bare feet, crying after the figure
disappearing halfway up the rise, beyond the street.

Line by line we move from a definite point in time (“on the night”), to an ongoing and simultaneous action (“ran out . . . crying”), and finally to an image marked by its remove from the rest of the action (“disappearing . . . beyond”). The medial caesura of each line helps us rhythmically, step by step, as do the definite articles. The final “disappearing” is a present participle, non-finite: not quite past and not quite present. And that last image of what is “beyond the street,” in its ghostly way, takes us through the longing into something even greater than the object of the longing, greater than the body of the street.

Continue reading “Review: Luisa A. Igloria’s THE SAINTS OF STREETS” →

Review: Jason Bayani’s AMULET

Amulet by Jason Bayani | Write Bloody Publishing 2013 | $15.00

AMULET
AMULET

After a Jason Bayani poem, sometimes all you can say is, “Damn.” At 84 pages, Amulet may cause excessive cursing. And not just to God, but to other “thing[s] just out of reach” (45), all the hollering forged into an object that will protect us from harm. His hands both a curled fist and a prayer, Bayani waits . . . waits for this noise to take the shape of language.

Amulet‘s epigraph invokes Jose Garcia Villa and gestures toward the romantic brokenness and terrific terror of the poems to follow, which are birthed from a lineage of great Filipin@ American writers. I’m not one to go in for beauty in poetry, but damn, the way Bayani “remak[es] the line” (as he suggests in the opening poem to this collection) is beautiful. Consider the lines “Give me the petal that hits like a heavy brick” (35) or “My body is a projection of stone that remembers the mountain it ran away from” (76). Feel the tidal movement of the earth and of time in the line: “all this history in the open veil of your body, / this seed, this push, this silt, / how we been built by a blood procession of so many hands / pulling plough over poverty” (67). On the back cover, Barbara Jane Reyes says that “the language of Bayani’s poems pops and bangs, punches, hurls bricks, and then does not flinch from tenderness,” and I agree that there is a surprising vulnerability here that disarms as much as it reveals its own strength.

The weight of this book is in its silences, in the words “just out of reach,” as it contemplates the impact of silence among men of color when no one really teaches you “what to do with your hands” (75). The palms, then, and the mouth, become heavy weights. While Bayani knows that “A man’s ability to feel is overvalued in Art. / I’ve cashed in on it. / Every woman who loved me / hates me a little for that” (24), he also urges us to “Imagine we’re in a room, and everything in this room / has a mouth except for me. I feel that most days” (22). It is Bayani’s humor and grief made vulnerable, and the felt sense of the body “fall[ing] into a hard focus” (37), that makes us listen to the ringing in that place inside ourselves. Continue reading “Review: Jason Bayani’s AMULET” →

Review: Feng Sun Chen’s BUTCHER’S TREE

Butcher’s Tree by Feng Sun Chen | Black Ocean 2012 | $14.95

MULDER: When Victor Frankenstein asks himself, “Whence did the principle of life proceed?” and then as a gratifying summit to his toils creates a hideous phantasm of a man, he prefigures the Postmodern Prometheus: the genetic engineer whose power to reanimate matter (genes) into life (us) is only as limited as his imagination is.
—The X-Files Episode 5×06, “Post-Modern Prometheus“

BUTCHER'S TREE
BUTCHER’S TREE

Emptied peanut butter jars are evidence of The Great Mutato’s presence in The X-Files episode “Post-Modern Prometheus.” A rejected genetic creation of Frankenstein-like scientist Dr. Pollidori, The Great Mutato’s deformities banish him to a dark cellar, where he eats peanut butter sandwiches and hungers for human connection. Feng Sun Chen’s Butcher’s Tree excavates the cavities in which such mythic, hybrid and feral figures as The Great Mutato, Prometheus, Wukong and Grendel dwell and, by placing a mouth to the opening, “eat[s them] up from the inside” (5).

Chen writes of feral creatures that are “[p]eeled from living rock” (65), birthed from stone, petri dish or sea, whether genetically engineered or spiritually divined; that share a certain “fall from grace;” and whose bodies (or whose power to create living forms) usurp the dominion of the immortal. As such they blur the lines between “god” and “man,” and as myths are imagined to possess monstrous shells, scales and hideous skins, but no souls. They are imagined as cavities, or as caves. In these hollowed spaces, creatures (the created) fill the emptiness with hunger. Chen writes, “[s]ilence, which is not additive, / can be filled with anything” (58). This hollowness is completely full of “everything that waiting breeds” (49), like the “trigger of longing” (44) and “alive loneliness” (32). In these cavities, “hearts [grow] teeth” (4).

A series of poems centers on Wukong, a shape-shifting Monkey King born from stone and the main character in the novel Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en. Chen writes that “he felt like a salmon inside a bear” and that “[e]ven in his dreams it was something else that moved / through him”—”[s]omething watched himself dream” (17). The nodes or root beings of Chen’s Butcher’s Tree share the desire to be inside something else, or are outside watching themselves—”When the soul steps from the body // and watches the body / and the body is flayed” (7). They are beings through which other energies move, and are constantly rearranged by grammar and outer skins. In all their hunger, they wish for “the world to pass through [them]” (91), but what they eat is not often easily digested, or easily let go.

When [Wukong] looked at the girl with transparent flippers, he knew that if he looked at her underneath side, he would be able to hear a sound of the wind leaving, or water falling. It would be salty. It would be alive. It would contain a creature with a heart that used no arteries or veins but whose blood bathed its organs in a single cavity. He thought of doors as smacking, windows as puckering. Every opening meant access to the sea now, or the wind on the sea. (18)

Chen’s image of rooted trees or fish bones, with their fern-like accumulation of branches and spines, speaks to a mathematical yet organic pattern. Of all possible reconstructions, Chen invites the reader to reconstruct the body out of “hall[s] of tongues, corridor[s] of knees […] some with just the scalp” (15). In so doing, we question origin. What is birth, really? To be hatched. Chen’s writing is a poetics of mutation and molecular gestation, of cell membranes and excretions, replicating in all cavities of the body. We come to ask, is the generative force of life hunger? And we learn how hunger itself reconstructs the body, how hunger becomes grammar.

But Grendel was hungry. He was hungrier than all the rest. His hunger

made his body magnetic with the rhetoric of hollowness:
Little tiny spikes, little tiny scrapes, rippling with tiny implosions. (66)

In the book’s final section, Chen gorgeously and wrenchingly re-imagines the creature Grendel from Beowulf, not as half man or beast, but as a woman—a trans/gender body. Grendel hungers until all he/she/sie is is hunger, until the body reconstitutes. “[T]his liplessness opened further into the labyrinth” (79), “two silences traveled and made interference waves” (82) and his/her/hir “beautiful beautiful body felt a massive echo” (98). Through each page, each abrupt insertion or amputation or aborted negative space, Chen’s Grendel surprises us with “new splatter” (82), touching us like “a pinprick of sand / within rounded numbness” (81).

Chen’s creatures are here flayed out, “woven into a delicate verge” (60). Take this book and “tuck it in a pocket. / Feel it all day, like a new organ” (41).

Two Reviews: Hoa Nguyen’s AS LONG AS TREES LAST and Ji Yoon Lee’s IMMA

As Long As Trees Last by Hoa Nguyen | Wave Books 2012 | $16

AS LONG AS TREES LAST
AS LONG AS TREES LAST

Hoa Nguyen’s As Long As Trees Last is not a book for the city. Shouting concrete and signal siren screech, emit exhaust, make it difficult to “string and feel // wind of wing beats / in your face” (1). Take these poems into the grove and let the “trees be the church” (32). What you have reads like the diary of a hapa witch, a cross-section of all seasons. The shortness of line and breath in Nguyen’s work makes for ritual incantations in a forest clearing, for songs for invasive seeds.

Nguyen utilizes the Chinaberry tree, indigenous to parts of Southeast Asia but later introduced to the southern United States, to hint at a larger discussion around diaspora, transnational economies, transplants, and transracial intimacies. Born in the Mekong Delta, Nguyen has lived for some time in Texas. Of Thai ancestry, I was raised in West Virginia and Virginia. Like Nguyen, I am also a person of mixed race and understand the kind of odd resonance between the Southern states and Southeast Asia that occurs in the humidity, leafy foliage and rolling mountain ranges. The speakers in Nguyen’s poems often feel like invasive species with toxic fruit, growing wild with distant roots, endangered but tasked with “rag laundry day” and “beans on toast,” no stranger to the poetry that halts and swings from their throats.

I am interested in the contraction of line that works in Nguyen’s poetry, which is also apparent in the way her breath designates measure when she reads her work. Her short lines are fragmented by breath patterns, and the breakages are defined by elongated exhales and sharp inhales. Spaces between lines and phrases often expand abruptly and then contract, like a lung muscle.

Green bathroom floor
rug and the yellow mug
you loved      Cutting stop
Stop her there like a
yield color

[…]

We love are

We love are          folds
around the stripes of being

Can be

We can      We love
are slung nests

(from “Dirt-Under-Nails Dirt,” 7)

In the excerpt above, notice how “rug” and “mug” snugly bookend a line, yet how the line immediately following (“you loved       Cutting stop”) offers a break, a brief but scary expansion between “loved” and “Cutting,” and a “stop” to counter the preceding rhythm. Notice how “We love are” could be read as “We love our” and how the syntax breaks the relationship between verb and object. In the excerpt below, watch the turns between “pen,” “Open,” “born,” “Horn,” “gown,” “torn” and “train,” as well as the ones between “feathers,” “violet,” “insides,” “heart,” “held,” “cup” and “dark.”

So obvious    feathers on a heart pen
or beneath violet insides      Open
center when your heart is a
small baby born

Horn cup held inside and you wear
a gown with dark torn
a dark train
and starry yellow
flags for me     maybe also
summer cicadas

(from “So Obvious,” 12)

As Long As Trees Last writes the stubborn, sassy and slicing survival of a woman that listens to the rage and whisperings of the land—”My soil: alluvial / the fertile      where my mother birthed” (25). Nguyen examines the bottom of a pioneer’s foot and knows what it means to be two [verbs, languages, adjectives, emotions] at the same time. From “Adopted” to “Native” to “Thatch,” “Trust” and “Vine,” these are some “Words You Should Know” when learning about the binding contracts and rapid contractions caused by diaspora’s intimacy with our world.

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IMMA by Ji Yoon Lee | Radioactive Moat Press 2012 | Sold Out, Free Download Available

IMMA
IMMA

Ji Yoon Lee’s chapbook IMMA is an explosion. It’s a minefield of samples spitting up in your face. It’s your life on a weapons of mass destruction diet. It’s pissed off, cocked and ready to rock. If war wrecks language, then IMMA has been reloaded from the wreckage.

I first saw Lee perform at this year’s Delta Mouth Literary Festival at Louisiana State University. In one piece, she spoke in Korean through a tiny bullhorn that made her voice tinny and mechanical, while playing a recording of the text (put through Google Translate several times) read in English by a computerized voice. I was blown away by her strategies of translation and her efforts to make language strange, a tactic that she uses in IMMA. These poems are made of a mangy, mangled, “commingledlanguage” that is fused and unwilling to be pulled apart. Words merge and clump in the mouth, unapologetically yelling.

The United States’ historical participation in war in the Pacific theater, and all that comes with it (R&R, mail order brides), has shaped so much of what Asian/White and Asian/American intimacies have become and continue to look like in the western imagination. War has directly contributed to the ways bodies of “the other” are carved and cut into and has influenced the readiness to feast on fear and feed into narratives of domination. “[Y]our synergistic globalization is my conglomerate prostitution:” writes Lee, who drops glitter bombs on gendered and racialized fantasies of supremacy and submission in this book and stares you down until you take it.

I’m ok being your diversity plan;
It is my mode of existence: It is my mode of insistence
There is the cityplan under my belt of explosives;
It is my mode of modification: It is my mode of fornication

Defamation of American flag: Defecation of unidentifiable flag
An unidentifiable body surfaces on the level of cheap alliteration
Please do not litter; be a good noncitizen
Please use the container provided; be a good conartist

Is it ok that I am your diversity case? Is it ok that I am your basket case?
Is it tolerable that I am your varsity case? Is it permissible that I am your it-girl showcase? […]
Is it okay I’m in your suitcase? Is it ok I’m your cold case? […]
My belly is warm and I am your forensic case

(from “To:”)

In the opening poem, “To:,” I love the way “existence” becomes “insistence,” “modification” becomes “fornication,” “Defamation” becomes “Defecation,” “alliteration” becomes “litter,” “container” becomes “conartist,” “flag” becomes “body,” “basket case” becomes “showcase” becomes “suitcase” becomes “cold case.” Each word has a volatility of sound that threatens to transform, changing its molecular structure and its meaning. The references to “diversity plan” or “diversity case” hint at some kind of tokenization or exotification that the speaker fights against through the course of the piece—fighting even past death, the belly still warm.

Imma manhandle my fatbags like a boss
Imma boorish catcall your funsacks like a man […]
Imma torch your house; lit with your beeswax
Imma rugburn your place down; like a boss on the secretary desk
Mind your own baloney business
& Go make me my balcony suicide sandwich

(from “you can’t handle my bloodhole”)

In “you can’t handle my bloodhole,” Lee lets fly more of her “commingledlanguage,” and like a “balcony suicide sandwich” you thought was baloney, it can be hard to chew. Words like “manhandle,” “fatbags,” “catcall,” “funsacks,” “beeswax” and “rugburn” roll around in the mouth but won’t break in two, just like the full-throttle, contractive force of “I am” and “gonna” in “Imma.” Ji Yoon Lee’s IMMA barrels on. It’s not water-soluble, “but you may need to swallow it.”

Review: Koon Woon’s WATER CHASING WATER

Water Chasing Water by Koon Woon | Kaya Press 2013 | $14.95

WATER CHASING WATER
WATER CHASING WATER

In Koon Woon’s Water Chasing Water, a river appears in one poem and flows into the next, appearing there as rain, turning up in one place as an ocean and in yet another as a damp and soggy sadness. I was immediately reminded of lê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For, and there on thúy’s first page: “Ba and I were connected to the four uncles, not by blood but by water” (3).

Woon’s text gestures toward the meanings of water—as life-giving force, as connective tissue, as that which carries us. lê thi diem thúy explains that “In Vietnamese, the word for water and the word for a nation, a country, and a homeland are one and the same: nu’ó’c.” In Thai, the word for river (แม่น้ำ) is made up of the word for mother (แม่) and the word for water (น้ำ). For the diasporic fish/ghost/dish-washer in Woon’s poems, water connects places to other places, traveling from person to person and washing up memories and other debris.

As if glazed in the afternoon heat,
the blackberry brambles are still and
quiet, the steel rail expanding,
and once the roar of a rumbling freight
passes and dies, the slough,
quiet again with its currents,
becomes water moving on
in my unregulated childhood.

[. . .]

In the waters between us are
the gurgling sounds of childhood empires
and paper boats, and in the parcels of land
that sustain us, the memories of stickers
and hand-staining berries;
in nights of sleep,
a child’s reworking of paradise. (“As If,” 5)

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Review: Kim Gek Lin Short’s CHINA COWBOY

China Cowboy by Kim Gek Lin Short | Tarpaulin Sky Press 2012 | $14

CHINA COWBOY

Gross and gorgeous about sums up the Kansas City karaoke nightclub and TECHNICOLOR cinema that is Kim Gek Lin Short’s China Cowboy—all “gorge,” gore and zero pretty. Short’s work is often grossly disturbing and excruciatingly seductive, catching the reader in a tense push and pull with and against the text. Sticky and stuck among the fucking and fucked-up, Short binds us within tales of fierce femme survival as her main character, the feisty and fisty La La, avenges the repeated death of Hollywood’s “dragon lady” with her boots, her mic, and her “country superstar humility.”

Short’s La La reminds me of the scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) when O-Ren Ishii (portrayed by Lucy Liu) severs Boss Tanaka’s head in front of the Tokyo crime council. When Boss Tanaka expresses his disgust at the perversion done to the council “by making a Chinese Jap-American half breed bitch [O-Ren] its leader,” she runs across the table and decapitates him, without hesitation. She waits for the blood to finish spurting from the cut, re-sheaths her sword, and with Boss Tanaka’s blood on her forehead, calmly addresses the other men:

[in Japanese] So that you understand how serious I am, I am going to say this in English. [re-sheaths sword, switches to English] As your leader, I encourage you from time to time, and always in a respectful manner, to question my logic. If you’re unconvinced a particular plan of action I’ve decided is the wisest, tell me so. But allow me to convince you. And I promise you, right here and now, no subject will ever be taboo. [cut to close-up] Except, of course, the subject that was just under discussion. The price you pay for bringing up either my Chinese or American heritage as a negative is, I collect your fucking head. [holds up Tanaka’s head] Just like this fucker here. [crescendo] Now if any of you sons of bitches got anything else to say, now is the fucking time! [silence, returns to calmer tone] I didn’t think so. [drops Tanaka’s head on table] (O-Ren Ishii, Kill Bill Vol. 1)

O-Ren Ishii shows the guys who’s boss in Kill Bill Vol. 1 (via Hotflick.net)

O-Ren’s swift and deadly gesture, as well as her sweet and brutal speech, is punctuated by the smiling faces of the only other women in the room, Gogo Yubari and translator Sofie Fatale. Here in a world of men, O-Ren reminds us of La La, who “can fly like they do in chop-chop movies,” “bawl in cowboy” and “lasso a noodle” (17). Just under 5’3″ in cowboy boots, La La is a ferocious folk-singer who headlines as “Patsy Clone” in the Kansas City nightclub from which this book takes its name, a nightclub that becomes a kissing-confessional booth square-dance around her “stab-n-steal” life, stolen death and steely fame.

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Review: Tan Lin’s HEATH COURSE PAK

HEATH COURSE PAK by Tan Lin | Counterpath Press 2012 | $17.95

HEATH

you have become a very beautiful thing in some
other version of a thing. or you have become a
very beautiful climbing apparatus in a program
about something,

Riding the GoToBus from Los Angeles to Oakland, I accidentally watched Rush Hour 3 and The Tuxedo from several strategically placed monitors while listening to the Counting Crows, M.I.A. and Meshell Ndegeocello on my headphones. I discovered that Jackie Chan, muted by a randomly generated soundtrack and offset by a variety of backdrops, is still Jackie Chan, in perhaps the same way Heath Ledger is still remembered as Heath in 10 Things I Hate About You (Modern Shakespearean Heath), Brokeback Mountain (Gay Cowboy Heath), or The Dark Knight (Joker-In-Drag Heath). When I wasn’t accidentally watching Jackie Chan fight somebody, I tried to look at the scenery off the 5, which I wanted to believe was more interesting but was in reality less accessible, and ended up accidentally reading incoming and outgoing text messages on the smart phone of a person sitting diagonally across the aisle. This entire experience—me accidentally looking at the mountains, Jackie Chan on mute, someone else’s text messages; you reading this compiled memory as a paragraph on a blog; followers liking, re-blogging, re-posting, sharing and tweeting this review; and then me importing the HTML into Microsoft Word and putting the whole thing through Google Translate a few times—might actually approach the experience of browsing and forgetting that is assembled in Tan Lin’s HEATH COURSE PAK.

What is HEATH?

plagiarism/outsource Ed. Rev., Notes Towards the Definition of Culture,Untilted Heath Ledger Project , a history of the search engine,disco OS annotated or HEATH, as the project is often referred to, is the revised second print edition of a book authored within a social network. Like following Heath Ledger’s death over the internet—through the rapid replication of speculative information, quotations, paraphrased material, tags and images as they unravel, reproduce and become felt by a social network—Lin’s assemblage of HEATH is a kind of muscle memory for feelings that are erased, re-written, read, scanned and searched repeatedly within a complex system of users, readers, commentators, followers, friends and authors.

Flip through the book once, and the ecology of HEATH shows coffee stains, autographed photos of Jackie Chan and Heath Ledger, images for GSM and RSS, handwritten post cards, post-its, SMS, blacked-out text and pencil markup. A closer look shows cut-and-paste traces of HTML imported into Word, extra line breaks created by absent flash advertisements, links and category tags, click here for details, edit/delete, captured image and text from Google searches, footnotes, text encoding/conversion, markup language, <space></space></CT> and other apparitions and pop-ups. In an interview that appears near the end of the book, Lin says, “These are all just various kinds of writing, where writing extends over a broad spectrum of textual matter and includes things with ‘weak’ author functions […] They all have been outsourced but not necessarily plagiarized, except by some sort of corporate branding structure or legal structure. […] Mistakes, formatting problems, copyright issues, unacknowledged sources are part of text. […] Everything is ‘authored,’ it’s just not clear who.” Continue reading “Review: Tan Lin’s HEATH COURSE PAK” →