A March APA Poetry Companion: Books to Keep You Company at Home

Header Image: An APA Poetry Companion, March 2020 (Monica Sok, A NAIL THE EVENING HANGS ON; Michelle Penaloza, FORMER POSSESSIONS OF THE SPANISH EMPIRE; Elieen R. Tabios, PAGPAG; Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, A TREATISE ON STARS; Eric Tran, THE GUTTER SPREAD GUIDE TO PRAYER; Rick Barot, THE GALLEONS, Kimiko Hahn, FOREIGN BODIES, Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, A BRIEF HISTORY OF FRUIT)
New and Notable APA Poetry Reads in March 2020

These are strange and heavy times we’re living in. As many of us find the physical confines of our daily worlds suddenly reduced to the square footage of our homes, books—more than ever—can help us to feel connected to the outside world. Whether you’re restless, in need of solace, or simply lonely for another voice, here are some new and recent books by APA poets to keep you company.

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OUR TOP PICKS THIS MONTH:

Michelle Peñaloza, Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire (Inlandia, 2019)

Though LR contributor Michelle Peñaloza’s Hillary Gravendyk Prize–winning debut collection came out last August, it’s been on this editor’s reading list for what seems like forever. I was a big fan of Peñaloza’s 2015 chapbook landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias 2015), with its powerful, geographically grounded vignettes and close attention to imagistic texture, and Former Possessions seems to promise a similar deep engagement with the complex layers of trauma and history with respect to narratives of place and migration.

Monica Sok, A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon, 2020)

Sok masterfully weaves together the skeins of narratives left fragmented by the legacy of war, trauma, and diaspora with a skillful hand, moving fluidly between past and present; Cambodia and Pennsylvania. Together, the poems in this debut collection comprise a whole cloth that is by turns tender and unflinching—not unlike the beautiful length of strong yellow silk (handwoven by the author’s grandmother) whose image wraps the cover of the book itself.

Eileen R. Tabios, PAGPAG: The Dictator’s Aftermath in the Diaspora (Paloma, 2020)

Yes, PAGPAG is fiction, not poetry, but it’s by LR contributor and APA literary great Eileen R. Tabios—we’d be amiss not to feature it! Hot off the presses (it was released barely a fortnight ago), this collection of short stories is not one to miss.

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ALSO NOTEWORTHY AND NEW:

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, A Brief History of Fruit (U of Akron, 2020)

Rick Barot, The Galleons (Milkweed, 2020)

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, A Treatise on Stars (New Directions, 2020)

Kimiko Hahn, Foreign Bodies (W. W. Norton, 2020)

Eric Tran, The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer (Autumn House, 2020)

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What new and notable books have been keeping you company this month? Share your recommendations with us in the comments or on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram (@LanternReview).

Panax Ginseng: The Compassionate Sentence

Panax Ginseng is a bi-monthly column by Henry W. Leung exploring linguistic and geographic borders in Asian American literature, especially those with hybrid genres, forms, vernaculars, and visions. The column title suggests the English language’s congenital borrowings and derives from the Greek panax, meaning “all-heal,” together with the Cantonese jansam, meaning “man-root.” This perhaps troubling image of one’s roots as panacea informs the column’s readings.

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Isamu Noguchi's "Seated Female Nude: Scroll" from 1930.
Isamu Noguchi’s “Seated Female Nude: Scroll” from 1930.

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Every line and stanza in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s Hello, the Roses (New Directions, 2013) discharges a single sentence, a mysterious effect.

It’s nothing like the prophetic long line of Whitman’s mad children, no Ginsberg howling on the street corner, saxophonic riffing and swelling, breathless in the moving city as it spills at the seams, flooding forth—

Not quite. Nor is it the disguising work of prose[-block] poetry. Prose poems are camouflaged in continuity, text-wrapped and pressurized without white space. Usually this means, even in narrative prose poems, a sinuous and subterranean movement. This allows an ending to suddenly lift upward out of horizontal motion. (Matthew Olzmann does such sequencing exceptionally well in his lineated poems, using absurd humor for torque.)

But Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s long line in Hello, the Roses is uniquely specific. Observe, from “The Mouse”:

I can’t recall the beauty of the almond trees.

I’m unable to distinguish between seeing trees, my instant awareness of ethereal beauty and trying to remember images of our having been in Greece.

The moment I think of trees, they diffuse into beings whose frequency so differs from mine, I can’t see them.

They connect with each other in groves that seem celestial, yet our worlds unify.

The dawn of the possibility of their appearance as form, stone, shifts probability toward angels. (12)

Continue reading “Panax Ginseng: The Compassionate Sentence” →

Weekly Prompt: Architectural Poem

Part of an architectural plan for a library (via Wikipedia)

This week’s prompt has a shorter explanation than usual.  I was simply very intrigued by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s use of a particular building’s architecture to shape her poem “Permanent Home.”  As Berssenbrugge engages with structural forms and technical language, the walls and beams of the house she’s describing become transparent, windows through which we can peek in at the speaker’s interior life while she peeks at us.

“The water tank sits on a frame of used wood, like a packing crate.

I look through it to an extinct volcano.

The panorama is true figuratively as space, and literally in a glass wall, where clouds appear like flowers, and the back-lit silhouette of a horse passes by.

A file of evergreens secures the cliff amid debris from a crew bilding, as at the edge of the sea.

Oranges, dumplings, boiled eggs take on the opaque energy of a stranger.

Knowledge as lintel, bond beam (model signs) holds the world at a distance.”
I love that last line, in particular. Berssenbrugge evokes such space and light with it.  A home (even an imagined one) becomes a whole world, a place of origin and a vantage point from which one develops one’s perspective.  And the lack of an actual physical structure to which to tie the speaker’s longing transforms the poem itself into a kind of home in which imagination dwells.  A process that, I think, has particular resonance for me, not just as a child of diaspora, but as one such subject who writes.

Prompt: Write a poem that uses the architectural structure of a building as a frame or form by which to shape its content and imagery.