Donna Masini
W. W. Norton & Company ($15.95)

by Bhisham Bherwani

A figurative meaning of “escape” is “mental or emotional distraction, especially by way of literature or music, from the realities of life.” A survey of such meanings and related criticism informed a 1975 essay, “Escape and Escapism: Varieties of Literary Experience,” in which Robert B. Heilman considered a range of possibilities to which the word could be applied. Though he addressed film as a vehicle of escape only briefly, his commentary suggests an approach to Donna Masini’s elegiac poetry volume 4:30 Movie.

The title references The 4:30 Movie, a genre television program broadcast on ABC in the 1970s that provides an ingenious scaffold for Masini to explore the illness and untimely passing of her sister. Sometimes played out as film, sometimes as film script, 4:30 Movie blurs the boundaries between fact and fantasy, as demonstrated in “A Fable”: “It’s grief’s freeze-framed churchyard / with its fresh-cut dirge, its pretend heaven.” The speaker, in the face of a dear one’s mortal affliction and impending death, straddles external and domestic reality, medicine and prayer, hope and despair, reprieve and frustration, dismissiveness and worry, and denial and acceptance, seen poignantly here in “Deleted Scene: Diagnosis (.23)”:

(Kitchen: Interior)

First they said allergy, then we worried.
Now she’s on the phone with the doctor, motions:
Thumbs Up! Haha, we say. Thumb cancer!
She hangs up. Pneumonia. Hooray!
Pleurisy and pneumonia! Such old-fashioned diseases.
But we’ll take them.

Film tropes provide the poet ample opportunity to escape not only from the horror of the reality before her, but also from memory, from grief, and from poetry itself. But for all the escape hatches at her disposal, Masini’s speaker remains stubbornly obsessed with the matter at hand, spawning a heartbreaking narrative through lyric and dramatic poems that entwine the reader in her emotional complex of anxiety and incredulity, of premonition and superstition. If anything, the premise grounds and contains the difficult subject Masini religiously pursues.

4:30 Movie recalls another similarly innovative poetry book, John Allman’s Loew’s Triboro (New Directions, 2004), also a volume with a New York setting and a sister that employs film as a liminal medium enabling the projection of the real to the imagined, and vice versa. Allman writes, “The movie theater . . . is the place of darkness where lives are expanded and our culture defines itself through its most common denominators.” Masini opens her book with just such a setting in “The Lights Go Down at the Angelika,” a poem in which we see the speaker after she leaves the theater tuned to what is real (“How yourself you are now / walking into the night”), as if reality were unreal: “Apples are more apples. / Paper more paper.”

With her urban, gritty voice informed by irony, Masini’s rapidly unspooling recollections are propelled through flashbacks, pan shots, and close-ups across poems with titles such as “Mind Screen,” “Point-of-View Shot: Celeriac,” “Tracking Shot: Subway Lines,” “Split Screen,” and “Scary Movie.” In her fervent outpouring, her charged tone and resounding keening contrast with a more temperate tone in other poems of loss. This intensity, reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s, risks pitting linguistic adroitness and naked grief against each other, but this is a risk that Masini negotiates as intrinsic to and necessary for her project, especially given her immediacy to the tragedy.

The middle section of 4:30 Movie is a sequence called “Water Lilies,” which centers on Monet’s paintings where plant and water aspire to aesthetic abstraction. These may provide Masini an escape from form, but offer slim consolation, and no escape, from her loss. But while Masini’s idiom and range of prosody—a sonnet, free verse poems, list poems, even a trailer script—mirror her agitation and the incessant tug of war between affirmation and anxiety, her sister is presented as poised and thoughtful, an unassuming figure gracefully and unobtrusively facing the inevitable. Masini’s departures from her subject, like her speaker’s from the theater, are simply detours and pretexts to return to it, to escape her escapism—which is as illusory and fleeting as that of a movie-goer’s.

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Katy Mongeau
Black Sun Lit ($15)

by Isabel Sobral Campos

In Apostasy, Katy Mongeau’s lyric “I” is a miscreant in search of redemption. These two long poems read like narratives suspended over a tense allurement between wish-fulfillment and nightmare:

You came to me with your hands all bloody.
You said you killed
the woman as if I’d shriek in delight.
Then you stuck one finger inside of me
like you were looking for a pulse.

At times, one suspects the murdered woman exists as resurrection, the rebirth of the narrator’s vengeful eroticism. Yet elsewhere, the narrator and murderer become as indiscernible as the “black birds” and “black flies” on the collection’s opening page. Apostasy has affinities with Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, particularly in how it derives a pleasurable, sublime experience from the body’s abjectness, and even its destruction. Mongeau’s poems jolt us with similar shockwaves erected upon murder, sliced flesh, and the orgasmic satisfaction that emerges from defilement: “I wanted /what I tried / to denounce.”

So death opens into the sacred and the possibility of inconceivable meaning; the latter returns to sentience in the form of arresting gratification. Mongeau’s poems traverse this delicate three-fold movement as transcendent value emerges through death, and only then is our materiality validated through pleasure. Here is how the poet puts it:

When you murdered me, I called it apostasy.

I think so highly of death—You once thought
so highly of me. It is no coincidence: a bouquet
of dried thistle and bluets, fake and flame retar-
dant, and all the other falsities damning me.

Evident throughout the book, the imbalance of control between “he” and “she” is inextricable from issues of consent. The narrator seems to validate and seek precisely what will wound them, but there is also an acknowledgement of sacrifice: “You wouldn’t believe what / I cost myself.”

Apostasy is a difficult collection to read, precisely for its ability to trouble ethical boundaries and shock one into considering unexpected psychic spaces of self-mutilation. For some, this jump might lead to problematic questions around metaphorical and symbolic linguistic use. For instance, when Mongeau writes that “I carried her flesh as my flesh / in the way that rape is a daisy chain,” aesthetics seek to overturn the violence of the act; the pleasant sonic and imagistic configuration of “daisy chain” causes one to recoil from the word “rape” exponentially more. But, does it though? The work gets tricky in these places, and perhaps the point is to unsettle. Hence, a final question remains—is Mongeau’s debut collection a revival of the neo-decadent lyric? If you care to find out, one must risk danger, and generously gamble with the prospect of finishing the book a bit more scabbed and unholy, observant to the inscrutable carrion of our world.

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by Michael Prior

Su Hwang was born in Seoul, Korea. In the 1980s, her family immigrated to New York City, where her parents ran a bodega in the Queensbridge Housing Projects; she later moved to San Francisco. Hwang now lives in the Twin Cities, where she earned her MFA in Poetry at the University of Minnesota. Currently, she teaches in the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and runs the organization Poetry Asylum, which she co-founded with Sun Yung Shin. Hwang is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the inaugural Jerome Hill Fellowship in Literature and the Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize.

Hwang’s debut collection, Bodega (Milkweed Editions, $16), recipient of the 2020 Minnesota Book Awards in poetry, poignantly considers how every interaction between people is freighted with history and tied to identity. The collection’s poems constantly return to the titular space—those small corner stores in New York City crammed with every good one can possibly imagine—where, between narrow aisles and across the counter, the tensions evoked by cultural difference, prejudice, and class simmer and sometimes boil over. “Instant Scratch Off,” “Graveyard Shift,” “Corner Store Still | Life,” and the title poem all explore these tensions, suggesting that the bodega is a politically-charged microcosm for life in the surrounding city, if not America as a whole.

Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted prior to the onset of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. For an essay by Su Hwang written in the wake of these events, see here.

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Michael Prior: The title poem of your collection shifts between vignettes that focus on the owners of a bodega, Mrs. and Mr. Kim; an employee, Raul; and two customers, Joseph and Sandy. The poem is written in the third person, and its perspectival oscillation seems almost novelistic—or at least a technique more easily identifiable with fiction. I read on your webpage that you were originally a fiction writer; how has that experience shaped your approach to not only Bodega’s individual poems, but also its structure overall? And how did you come to the bodega as a creative lens and structural conceit?

Su Hwang: Thank you so much, Michael, for this opportunity to talk about Bodega––it’s an incredible honor and delight.

I’m not sure I can honestly call myself a former fiction writer, rather I thought I had to write fiction to be considered a “legitimate” writer, so maybe it’s more accurate to say failed wannabe fiction writer. It’s become obvious (to me) in the last few years that I was attempting to work in the wrong genre all along. Not to say I’ll never attempt writing prose in the future, but I always struggled with the form, and it didn’t help that I lacked the discipline needed to write long narrative work on a consistent basis. I was restless and aimless, but one thing has remained consistent: my voyeuristic gaze. During pockets of inspired moments in my twenties and thirties, I started many “chapter one” folders on my computer, but soon abandoned them when I couldn’t get past a certain point in my next great American novel, constantly wrestling the obnoxious inner critic. I was living and working in NYC and Brooklyn on and off during that time, so most of my half-baked stories took place in quintessential spaces like a subway car, greasy diners, the Brooklyn Bridge, and yes, bodegas. Plot was my Achilles’ heel, yet I was pretty good at setting. I’m also a Libra, so it’s just in my nature to be relational––meaning, I’ll never stop contending with another, the ways in which we other, as well as my own otherness. I’ve always stored imagistic snapshots of the people and objects around me, and writing Bodega became an exercise to find the beauty of our collective smallness amid human hardships.

After attending my first AWP as a grad student in 2014, I left Seattle knowing the title of the book before writing a single poem. I got an intuitive hit during one of the “first book” panels and realized I could use this urban, communal space to serve as both metaphor and thematic backbone for what was to become my MFA thesis. And as a child of Korean immigrants whose parents owned a corner store, it’s also a setting I had to contend with in my writing. I didn’t know exactly what would come of the work, but I knew action and conflict were inherent in this egalitarian space where a rich white guy buying cigarettes could interact with an undocumented person of color sweeping the floor, or a college student cramming for exams could chat with a taxi driver starting his late-night shift while ordering coffee. In this place, anything was and is possible. Every interaction, conversation, observation involves at least two people, two perspectives, two histories––which creates immediate tension, a kind of narrative. I might suck at writing fiction, but I know that a good story needs to have a point of conflict regardless of genre. Fiction also allowed for the possibility for the collection to be populated by various speakers, shifting from numerous POVs, and the titular poem, which some have likened to a short play, was one of the first poems I wrote for the thesis.

In terms of structuring Bodega, I think my limited background in fiction hindered the ordering process to some degree. I was really concerned about preserving the narrative arc, so many earlier versions of the manuscript had a static, linear quality––like if this happened then this next thing must follow and so forth. Applying this logic to poetry doesn’t quite have the intended effect. Luckily, I had the privilege of having the amazing poet and fellow Milkweed Editions author Rick Barot offer his genius during the final revision phase. He instructed me to cut over twenty pages from the bloated manuscript and offered keen insights like imagining the collection as a house, and to enter and exit from different doors—namely, to start with “Instant Scratch Off” and end with “Sunchoke,” which were both buried in the manuscript. I had deemed them weaker poems, but once I bookended them like he advised, the rest of the manuscript sort of magically fell into place like some dark night of the soul. By visualizing the poems spatially and in conversation with one another three-dimensionally rather than sequentially, I was able to unearth the perfect, dynamic shape of the book. I’m forever indebted to Rick for offering me such an important key to the house of my first collection.

MP: The book begins with a letter to your parents, written in Korean; a note beneath the letter clarifies that it was translated into Korean by the poet Emily Jungmin Yoon. Could you speak to why it was important for you to position this letter as one of the first texts the reader encounters in the book? And does it, for you, relate to the book’s multi-lingual, multi-register poetics?

SH: Thank you for asking this, and a special shout-out to stunning poet Emily Jungmin Yoon for her time and labor in exquisitely translating the letter. Although I wish I could take credit for the letter’s impression and impact on the reader, the initial reason was pretty simple: I wanted to be able to communicate to my parents, for the very first time actually, the full extent of my feelings and thoughts in writing this book, and, well, being their daughter. I essentially lost my ability to speak and read Korean when we immigrated to the U.S. when I was eight years old, and my parents’ English, even now, is a work in progress, so we’ve never been able to truly express our deepest longings and fears. A lot of things have gone unsaid and will never be salvaged. I’ve joked that I didn’t want them to disown me once they got a copy of the book, but I carried a lot of anxiety and fear for many years and projected my own insecurities onto the whole enterprise. It’s never easy writing about family, and I certainly had no idea how they would respond to having the past drudged up in such a public, permanent way. I think this is a major concern for those writing about family and trauma––this inexplicable sense of guilt, worry.

The loss of language and the accumulation of missed opportunities due to miscommunication are major themes in the work, and I found it only fitting that I reserve this space solely for them. They sacrificed their own dreams and endured unimaginable suffering so my brother and I could have better lives, the least I could do was build a kind of monument within the book to thank them. It was also a letter to my extended family given the legacy of my grandfather and uncle’s work in Korean literature––I wanted a way to articulate that writing this book was an act of respect and love not only for our family but the greater diaspora. I realize now that this gesture takes on more import by the very nature of it being the first thing a reader encounters when opening up the book, but my initial motivation was completely personal. What still amazes me today is that no one at Milkweed Editions has asked to see the English version of the letter, and I really value the fact that they have honored my privacy and agency. Once I got the positioning of the untranslated translated letter approved, I realized it would act as a mirror, and the reader who cannot read Korean (like myself) can experience, even if for one second, what my parents or any immigrant continues to struggle with learning a new language while trying to survive in a country that never really welcomed them.

When I finally worked up the nerve and sent my parents a copy of the book several weeks after publication, they called me from their retirement community in Southern California, crying––proud. They were touched by the letter and in that moment, I realized that art can transcend trauma. It has to.

MP: The loss of one language and the struggle to claim another certainly haunts many of these poems. I’m thinking, too, of the intergenerational ramifications of moving to a country that presents itself as a place of welcome and “opportunity,” but whose realities starkly contradict this. Poems like “American Seismology,” “Migratory Patterns,” “The Price of Rice,” “Fault Lines,” and “Fresh off the Boat | Five Sonnets” movingly explore these traumas. In the latter, the young speaker’s parents have taken the family out to dinner at a chain restaurant; she “pretends” that her family is “royalty” until the illusion is shattered by her parents’ English:

Whenever they
asked waitresses questions in their broken
English, I’d sulk into my sticky seat—my
cheeks boiling, my claws grappling the air.

I can’t help but note how the line break after “broken” enacts the parent’s difficulties with English, the breaking of language also being the breaking of certain narratives associated with the “American Dream.”

SH: Yes, the breaking and reassembling of language as well as the flawed notion of the American Dream are major concerns of this collection, just as they have been in my life off the page. Haunt is a good word to describe it. There are so many gaps and fissures, claustrophobic fits and starts, fragments and erasures in the toll of our human stories, but how they manifested were the ways in which my parents bought into the promise of coming to America versus the reality of surviving here. I wanted the poems to enact the very issues they were trying to confront or interrogate whether through form, movement on the page, or poetic technique like metaphors and line breaks as a kind of molecular mimicry. And I don’t know about you, but nothing gives me more pleasure than a good, precise line break because you get more poetry bang for the poetry buck.

I also aimed to highlight the malleability and perceived fallibility of language especially in an immigrant household where our version of “Konglish” was the official Frankensteinian mode of communication. Oftentimes, my parents would speak to me in basic Korean and I’d respond in basic English and soon there’d be a mashup of the two to get our point across. In public, the shame of their imperfect English would puncture any semblance of normalcy or safety for a child desperate to “fit in—be non-other.” Assimilation can be a death knell for the mother tongue. In “Flushingqueens” and “Portrait of Ladymothering,” I intentionally put separate words together to create another word, however random or haphazard it may seem to the reader, because that was what it was like in my family. Language, for most of my childhood into adulthood, was at the surface level a kind of negotiation.

English is not my native language, but it’s the vehicle in which I have formed my hyphenated identity. I was eight when we moved to the U.S., so I was fluent in Korean but somehow lost it, and it’s always felt like a ghost language. I know it’s locked away somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind but I’ve never been able to access it, so yes, it’s another haunting. Growing up, I resented having to go to Korean school on weekends, which never amounted to much because my Korean never improved, but this sense of straddling two languages, two worlds has remained. What was then a burden feels like irreparable loss now. This is the trauma for the first generations of immigrants in any country––that constant vertigo of not feeling rooted anywhere, no longer there but not really here. Language, in this way, is temperamental, cruel even. I also wanted to explore my fascination with words that have no direct English translation, words that defy the language of colonizers. The “Han” sequence, “Wabi-Sabi,” and “Duende Essays” play on this idea that English is not the be-all and end-all of languages. Entire galaxies can be conjured by a word that only exists in this other language often deemed secondary to English, and I wanted to celebrate them through poetry. Yes, I realize I’m typing this in English and my book is written in English with Korean words spelled out phonetically in English, but it some small way, I wanted to honor these words that live separately from this predominant gaze, that language is never static or hierarchical.

MP: One of the poems I’ve been constantly returning to is your sestina, “Sestina of Koreatown Burning,” which deconstructs the media’s reinforcement of the model minority myth during the 1992 L.A. Riots. Form is the ultimate metaphor here, with the sestina’s cycling end-words—“glass,” “fists”, “against,” “live,” “shattered,” and “ground”— evoking the Riots. The poem movingly proposes solidarity between “Black and Korean lives,” rather than division. How did this poem find this form, and how were you thinking of the book’s formal texture as a whole? There’s a wide variety of things happening here, from sonnets to open field compositions.

SH: Bodega started out as my MFA thesis, and as a graduate student and a late bloomer relatively new to poetry, I was eager to try my hand at writing all sorts of poems, employing as much formal diversity as I could muster to flex certain poetry muscles if you will, and as a way to mirror the thematic concepts of the bodega onto the page. Just as someone can find a gamut of goods from sodas to a sewing kit walking the aisles, I wanted the reader to experience a slew of forms as they traversed the book, so as to mimic the sensation of being in a cramped corner store. Another motivation was to subvert the pejorative notion, perpetuated by mostly white poetry critics in recent years, that narrative poetry exploring “identity politics” by poets of color somehow lacks formal rigor, as if telling our individual stories seems frivolous or that it’s taking up too much precious poetry space. Fuck that. In a kind of protest, I wanted form as narrative to be one of the major threads in the book as a way to show that the two modes of writing aren’t mutually exclusive.

For me, each poem dictates the form they will eventually take as they come into being. I usually start a poem as a couplet, then it begins to take shape soon thereafter. As for “Sestina of Koreatown Burning,” I knew I wanted to write about the LA Riots since it was such a major event during my teenage years, and initially intended it to be a prose poem. But soon it became clear that the poem was reading more like a Wikipedia entry about the LA Riots than a poem about it, and realized I needed to focus on images rather than a factual retelling. Around that time, I was reading Jamaal May’s debut collection Hum and Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler, and I admired their incredible sestinas, so I thought I’d give it a shot. Adopting a formal application helped add much needed structural integrity to the poem and elevate it from a pedantic rant. The first line came to me as I set the scene, then the rest of the stanza followed. Once I typed out all the end words:

. . . glass
. . . fists
. . . against
. . . live
. . . shattered
. . . ground

. . . ground
. . . glass
. . . shattered
. . . fists
. . . live
. . . against

. . . and so on, it was like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. I also selected some end-words that not only evoked key images but those that could take on more than one form (i.e. ground, foreground, grounds, grounding, grounded) so the lines had a little more flow. The general outline of the sestina came to me in one sitting, but I revised this poem countless times over a couple of years. I’m not sure I’ll write another sestina again, it’s definitely not for the faint of heart!

MP: I know you just got back from the book tour; has reading from the book changed your relation to it? And, it might be too soon to ask, but have you been writing anything new?

SH: First, I must profusely thank the Jerome Foundation and Milkweed Editions for making the book tour possible. Without their respective fiscal and administrative support, there would have been no way for a debut poet like me to fund such an endeavor. Although I was nervous going into each reading (and probably imbibed a little too much whiskey beforehand), I was incredibly lucky to have had incredible poets read with me, which helped dissolve any lasting anxiety. Everyone I met from booksellers to event coordinators to audience members were brilliant, kind souls. Another way I tried to ease some stress was to intentionally select cities where I have a network of good friends, so it was like a mini-homecoming in many respects.

What I couldn’t anticipate about the book tour was how I began to view the book as an organic, living thing, given how each reading had its own unique energy and direction. I found myself reading different poems, allowing me to plant myself in the present moment. In many ways it felt like an exercise in performance art, which was both terrifying and liberating in equal measure. It’s also interesting how reading from the book changes the conversation between poems. New orders were created, where in one reading I’d start with a poem from the second section and close with the opening poem, altering the relationship of the poems from the printed version. Pretty neat and totally unpredictable.

I’m learning there’s a lot of follow-up work to launching a book, so I haven’t had a lot of mental bandwidth to work on writing new stuff per se, but I am piecing some things together in my head and reading as much as I can. I started a strange, long poem at a writing residency during the summer of 2017 titled “Rooster,” and it’s unlike anything I’ve written before. I’m hoping it will serve as the foundation to my second collection, Roost—broadening the scope of my work beyond narrative and lyrical modes to interrogate metaphors of containment and long-held systems of oppression by looking at history from different cultural contexts. I’m envisioning a kind of textual collage of braided essays in verse to further investigate themes of madness, modern-day slavery through mass incarceration, prison abolition, borders, time, and witchery from a feminist, woman of color lens. We’ll see where this rabbit hole goes!

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Lars Iyer
Melville House ($16.99)

by Scott F. Parker

1. Nietzsche calls to the fiction writer, the mystique of his name inclining some to invoke it (When Nietzsche Wept, Nietzsche’s Kisses) or its associations (the film The Turin Horse, The Will to Power by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche) in their titles. Into this company, Lars Iyer throws his Nietzsche and the Burbs.
2. The economy of Nietzsche and the Burbs: book title, name of band formed by main characters, plot summary, all in one.
3. Style is essence here. Minimal narration, more like a play than a novel. A few words to establish setting, then right into dialogue.
4. So much dialogue, much of it funny, all of it smart. Still, it is possible to spend too much time listening in on teenagers—even clever ones—talk and talk and talk.
5. I remember these characters from high school and how they appeared from where I was standing: culturally astute; dexterous with reference, allusion, and wit; brilliant and bored; cynical and sad. I didn’t hang out with them then, and I don’t want to hang out with them now. They can be impressive and entertaining, but they are simply too exhausting.
6. Nietzsche and the Burbs is a kind of cinéma vérité too true for its own good. Like its characters, it’s a bit too clever, too showy, too ironic, too cerebral. It’s like a Linklater film without his tender delight in the stuff of life (Linklater is nothing if not an anti-nihilist).
7. All theory, no action, the book knows what it needs: “Maybe we’ve got to play against our cynicism,” one character says. “Break through to something.” Something, yes, but what?
8. “We need vocals . . . . We need someone to lead the songs. Some we can follow.” Nietzsche, of course. Through his character in the novel’s world as through his prose in our world, Nietzsche animates. His readers will recognize him here by more than name; Iyer’s Nietzsche taps the intensity, brilliance, and dynamism of his namesake. When we meet him, he is renouncing the assumptions of the bourgeoisie. His teacher is incredulous: “You want to get rid of the economy? What would we have in its place?” His answer, naturally, is “Life.” If you are stimulated by Nietzsche the philosopher, you’ll be stimulated by Nietzsche the suburban teenager who threatens the inertia of the suburbs and his peers whenever he speaks (or sings), which is not frequently.
9. The book, like the band, is lost without its frontman. Before anyone can escape the nihilism they’re all mired in, Nietzsche—and this is just one of many playful parallels with the philosopher’s biography—has a breakdown and comes to be under the care of his mother and evil sister.
10. But nihilism. Everyone in the book keeps saying it. Nihilism. “Sounds interesting,” the narrator says. “It isn’t interesting. It’s devastating,” Nietzsche responds.
11. It’s only right that the young Nietzsche is cast as the philosopher of the suburbs. If you can overcome nihilism in the suburbs, you can overcome it anywhere. Therefore, for one to really live, to thrive, to become, to overcome, only the suburbs will do. But if even Nietzsche can’t escape nihilism, what hope is there for a band of ironically detached teenagers? He issues his assessment of “devastating” on page eleven. In the 300-plus pages that follow, none of his peers take his claim to heart. What hope is there for readers?
12. The book is mired in its condition. Whereas you leave an encounter with the philosopher Nietzsche feeling—feeling—his effects, you put down Nietzsche and the Burbs with a wry smile (if you like it) or eyes hurt from rolling (if you don’t). Either way, all the action is in your head, where nihilism thrives.

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Alexandra Chang
Ecco ($26.99)

by Bethany Catlin

It’s 2013. Zhang Jing researches, pitches, and submits a review of Sheryl Sandberg’s neo-feminist tome, Lean In. A male editor mauls it, demolishing the nuance of Jing’s review, which she finds published the next day under a simpering title without ever getting her approval. Instead of a thoughtful examination of feminism-gone-corporate, Jing’s work has been reduced to one-note clickbait—and the raise she “leaned in” to ask for months ago has yet to materialize. Lonesome little ironies like this one characterize Jing’s experience as a woman, as a writer, as a daughter, and as a Chinese-American.

Days of Distraction follows Alexandra Chang’s protagonist across the country from her tech journalist job on the West Coast to Ithaca, New York, where her boyfriend J is starting a PhD program at Cornell University. Though journalism does not exactly make her heart sing, Jing is a habitual researcher, hunting for affirmation or red flags in 19th-century news articles, urban dictionary web pages, Pew studies, and the FAQ section of OkCupid.

A glance at the author bio and a serious moment three-quarters through the novel, when J drops the affectionate “Jing Jing” and addresses the narrator as “Alexandra,” reveal that Chang didn’t mine only the internet or The New York Times for her material. Days of Distraction is autofiction, and it honors the genre with a steely self-awareness and a hard look at self-consciousness itself. Jing is willing to consider alternative explanations, to challenge her own perceptions, yet the insistent sexist and racist barriers she cannot stop encountering refuse to evaporate with an attitude adjustment.

Even as she notices how much of her experience goes unnoticed, Jing is refreshingly forthcoming about her own failures of attention. She realizes that she has been mistakenly referring to J’s laboratory work as “eye stuff” when he has actually been studying the genetics that predispose people to strokes. She scoffs at his family’s long-winded attempts to provide directions and dismisses J when he notes that they don’t all have smartphones equipped with Google Maps. On a visit to see her father in China, she describes herself primarily as exhausted by him. She documents her addiction to her phone, and all of the false realities inside it. Jing hopes to be understood without always seeking to understand, but her process of doing so firmly asserts her voice while enmeshing it in the thoughtful context of constant research and moments of unaffected tenderness.

Much of the novel tracks the progression of Jing’s self-concept when she follows her boyfriend across the country (after extensively Googling “trailing spouse”). She is not happy, but she wasn’t exactly happy before. She feels alone, but doesn’t know if she feels alone because she is not white and everyone in Ithaca is, or because she is not white and J is, or because J is always at the lab, or because her job is not satisfying, or because her family is far away, or . . . Much of this pain goes into challenging the limitations of her interracial relationship. And yet, the book always retains its three dimensions, and the beloved tedium of her shared life with a California white boy suffuses the novel with much of its firmest, fullest detail—the rituals of cooking, texting, driving, being. Despite the depictions of those critical gaps in understanding inherent in any heterosexual and especially any interracial relationship, Chang can’t help but make J the most endearing character in the book, loving him onto the page.

Days of Distraction is for anyone who needs a companion story to sit with their experience of being a person of color, or of being a woman, or of being a woman of color. This is also exactly the kind of reading that male and particularly not-white people need to undertake—it spotlights the ways in which one’s ethnicity or gender is inflated in its omnipresence and yet compressed into an archetype in almost every interaction. Jing mulls over an uncomfortable conversation with an overeager white woman: “She didn’t mean anything by it. . . . What does this mean, then?”

Chang’s book is ultimately a deeply comforting one because her protagonist is so often both disappointed and disappointing. It honors dissatisfaction, distraction, and distancing oneself from one’s own life and the characters in it—as well as holding them all inside as treasures, “preciously familiar, like a memory come alive.”

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Click here to purchase this book
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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2020 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2020

Editor’s Note: To celebrate the publication of Matthew Rohrer’s new book The Sky Contains the Plans (Wave Books, $16), Dobby Gibson and Matthew Rohrer were scheduled to converse in the Twin Cities this past April. With that event cancelled for obvious reasons, we asked them to have a conversation anyway, and what follows below is the result. We offer it to our readers as a testament to poetry and friendship in these troubled times. (Please note the conversation was conducted prior to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.)

Matthew Rohrer is the author of several books and chapbooks, including The Others (Wave Books, 2017), which won the Believer Book Award, and A Hummock in the Malookas (Norton, 1995), selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver. He was one of the founders of the magazine Fence, and teaches in the writing program at New York University.

Dobby Gibson is the author of Polar (Alice James Books, 2004), which won the Beatrice Hawley Award, and three subsequent collections published by Graywolf Press, most recently Little Glass Planet ($16), named a Top Book for Spring 2019 by BuzzFeed. A recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board, he lives and works in St. Paul, Minnesota.

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Dobby Gibson: Hello to you, friend, from a socially distanced 1,201 miles. It’s hard to imagine you confined in New York City during this terrifying pandemic. Your poems are so full of walking around the city, and crowds and subways and ferries, and allowing your eye to wander out the window into the streets and sky. What’s life like for you under shelter-in-place?

Matthew Rohrer: Hi Dobby. It’s particularly bittersweet to be talking to you this way today, when I would have been on a plane on my way to see you, and do some readings for our books in your delightful city. Instead I am sitting on my couch, like millions of other people. And the truth is, I’m sure my experience is exactly like theirs too. And much better than many people’s. I’m very lucky to have enough food, and lots of boxes of wine, and a family that I actually like to spend time with. In terms of the poems—you know, I used to be a stay-at-home dad for five years, and figured out how to write without outside, outdoor stimulation. Maybe that seems odd to some people—aren’t poets just supposed to be in their garrets alone anyways?—but for me, I’ve always needed to or wanted to be out in the city, walking around, getting an electrical charge from the people, their speech, the energy of the city. So now we have a mourning dove nest on our fire escape and I call the mother Desiree, and I think about her a lot.

DG: This new book of yours is wild and wonderful, and like all of your books, so incredibly companionable. When I heard you read from it in New York City last month, I overheard someone leaving the event say to a friend, “I suddenly remember what it’s like to like poetry again.” It was such a wonderful compliment—but also so damning for the genre. It makes me wonder how you think about the relationship between poetry and pleasure. Why is it that so many people perceive poetry fails them in this regard?

MR: Have you heard that talk that Williams gave where he says “If it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem?” There’s also an online thing where you can listen to him say that on endless loop for 10 hours. I imagine fleets of helicopters descending over every cultural hub in America, playing that from weather-proof speakers attached to their undercarriages. I also think people misunderstand this quote—it doesn’t mean poems have to be funny or silly. I think Etheridge Knight’s poems are a pleasure to read, and they’re not silly at all. I also want to suggest, Dobby, that a part of this comment was aimed at you; your reading that night was really filled with light and pleasure too. I think people, at least in that audience, were unused to hearing someone so disarmingly gentle and truly questioning. There’s a duende to your poems that outs other people’s bossy poems as the narrow-ass things they are.

DG: That’s very nice of you to say. Now I have to ask you this, perhaps the biggest question on anyone’s mind right now about you and your new book: Did you wear special pajamas while writing these hypnagogic poems?

MR: Like many people in America, I wear a new-ish species of pant known as “resting pants” or “lounging pants” that are remarkably cheap because they are made by slaves in factories far away.

I want to ask you a question now: We just read together at NYU, and were going to give a couple readings for our latest books, and I wondered if you think there’s anything different about reading now, especially on the road, as compared to when we were younger?

DG: Readings feel less important to me than when I was younger. But I don’t believe my feelings about the act itself have changed much. At the risk of revealing my Midwestern inferiority complex, when I read out of town—or in town—both of which are rare enough to be special occasions, I still assume I’m viewed as an unknown and possibly unworthy interloper, and that my only chance at survival is to gingerly disarm an audience predisposed to reject me. No one has any professional obligation to like my work, and I’m not going to dazzle anyone with an outsized stage presence, that’s for sure. I love and dread that feeling of sending a tiny poem machine into a strange room and discovering what material it can gather from the lunar surface.

Too much uproarious laughter or cheesy gasps or too many sounds of assent and I’ll become suspicious of my poem. Same too, of course, for anything met by polar silence. I suppose this gets back to the complicated relationship between poetry and pleasure.

I have this thought about poetry readings and your work, perhaps confirmed by the afterword to your book, that the high-wire word-by-word collaboration readings you did with Joshua Beckman back in 2001 were the moment you were bit by the radioactive spider. That changed forever the way your poems think and move, and even your relationship to the line. Is that fair or am I wildly overstating things in my resting pants?

MR: I think that sounds right. It didn’t really change my relationship to readings though—I still find them strange and uncomfortable. Also did you know I just figured out I have social anxiety? I realized this at age 48. It explains so much about me. But yes, those intensive couple years working non-stop with Joshua definitely changed almost everything about how I approach poems. And here’s a funny thing he taught me that sort of ties these two threads together: he used to go to a bi-monthly open mic reading in the deepest recesses of Staten Island, where no one there knew who he was at all, and he’d read only as a way to edit his poems. He’d read his poems aloud to people and like you were saying, too much of anything—assent, dissent, laughter, gasps—helped him understand what kind of editing the poem needed. Once he took a bunch of us there with Tomaž Šalamun and we all read to a room full of people who were very polite.

DG: A secret Staten Island open mic workout regimen sounds very Joshua. He’s like the Rick Rubin of American poetry to me. He’s a student of the inner game in ways I will never be, in all my impatience.

I have been cleaning out old drawers during quarantine, and I rediscovered a promotional flyer from one of my strangest poetry readings, which was a campaign event for a U.S. House candidate a long time ago. He asked a few artists to play music or read poems or whatever at this rah-rah thing, and I participated, even though he wouldn’t be representing my district, because he was a DFLer and I generally believed in his cause. I remember this wave of regret crashing over me on the drive home. Even though I read preexisting poems, I felt used. The whole thing felt absurdly extracurricular. It felt as if I allowed my art to be domesticated and brought to heel. I swore to myself I would never do such a thing again and I would try harder to protect poetry as the one part of myself that was truly free. I don’t know if that makes sense or if I sound like the Muppet Sam the Eagle.

MR: Of course it does! They have to be so free that even your friends might not like them. They have to be so free that you might not even like them. I’m reminded of that scene in Starship Troopers where the teacher tells Rico “Figuring things out for yourself is the only freedom anyone really has.” I think that’s partly true, and then there are your poems, where you can also be free, where you can try to demonstrate what real freedom might look like.

DG: It’s like that great C. D. Wright quote: “It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free and declare them so.” Here we are, subjected by this huckster racist autocrat, trapped inside amid a global pandemic: What else do we have to go on?

You have been reading the letters of Lew Welch. I’m interested in any poet who found a way to live outside of the academic world—I’m always looking for another model. It’s my understanding that Welch—who was the stepfather to 1980s rocker Huey Lewis!—in his days as an advertising copywriter, created the tagline “Raid Kills Bugs Dead,” which is so great. What can we learn from him?

MR: Isn’t that such a great line? RAID KILLS BUGS DEAD. It’s all accents. It’s like swearing at someone. I think Welch is an under-appreciated poetry hero and maybe what he has to teach us, besides the ability to be an incredible poet without having students tagging along after you, is that if you really want to be good, and if you just hole up and put in a ton of work, you’ll come out the other side good. It might also be that he teaches us that you can be surrounded by much more famous friends and secretly be better than them.

DG: Are you familiar with Brian Eno’s concept of “scenius.” It’s the idea that a localized cultural ecosystem is superior to individual creativity, and a network is superior to a hierarchy. It’s an idea I’ve seen embraced by tech bros, which makes me skeptical. But now I wonder about Lew Welch and San Francisco scenius versus genius. Or Etheridge Knight. He seems far more genius than scenius, but what would he be without the pool halls of Kentucky or the friendship of Gwendolyn Brooks? There’s something quaint about the idea of scenius now that we’re all so interconnected as to have formed a collective biohazard.

I heard the poet Sun Yung Shin once say that being a good poet means being a good ancestor. I like thinking about her words in different ways. One way I think about them: As poets especially, our “scene” isn’t restricted by time or place, or life or death. I feel as if I’m writing in conversation with Du Fu as much as I am you.

MR: I didn’t know about that Eno idea but it makes sense; it seems to explain Seattle in the ’90s, or even the Lake District in the 1790s. And I totally agree with “being a good ancestor”! I think poets who do not count among their contemporaries and friends the dead poets are pretty quickly outed as not really poets. Or maybe just outed as young poets, who have yet to figure that out. I wonder who you turn to when you need a poetry recharge, or maybe especially now that we are all frozen in time and worried and people are dying all around us and losing jobs and everything is so FUBAR. . . . Are there poets that help you with your brain? Are there poets that help you with your poetry? I’m curious because to me your poems are so very much YOU—they always feel so firmly planted in the present. But I wonder who you have hidden underneath them?

DG: Stevens and O’Hara for sure, but I rarely reach for their books, the poems are so in me. I tend to self-diagnose, Web MD-style. If I’m feeling unimaginative, maybe I grab an old Field Translation Series book, like Miroslav Holub or someone like that. If I’m feeling inattentive, it might be Issa or Adelia Prado. If I’m unmotivated, Eileen Myles or Terrance Hayes or Hopkins or someone with a real song. When I need to access even more of my Scandinavian pain—and how could that be anything but a really good idea—there’s Tranströmer or Malena Morling.

Here’s a great and forgotten book: False Prophet by Stan Rice. He was married to Anne Rice. The book picks up at Psalm 151 where the Bible left off. He wrote it on his deathbed.

Really, though, I’d much rather be infected by a poet or poem when my guard is down. It’s one of the only reasons I stay on Twitter: reading people’s screenshots of good poems, which I then save to my phone. But, good God, do I have to read a lot of garbage to be struck by one golden poem.

I like it when you send me a poem out of the blue. Will you tell me who you read when you need to remember the taste of poetry—and then will you send me a poem?

MR: Usually when I need to retreat, to freshen up, it’s because the Voice of Modernity has spread all around me like this vulgar little virus we have with us now. I have to, and want to, read a lot of contemporary poetry, and after awhile, and this might sound untrue, but there is a Contemporary Sound that permeates even the most disparate poets. There’s this texture of modernity that everyone just floats on and in, and despite the insanely great and impressive range of poetry right now, it begins to irk me, and I need to escape to a different diction. Today by the way is Wordsworth’s birthday, and I love his early work. Not the lame stuff. Just the good stuff. And Williams, honestly reading Williams is sometimes too humbling—have you read the poems in Spring and All recently? They’re completely up-to-date. And they make me wonder what I have to offer. They sort of make me feel terribly small and useless, and I think that’s a great feeling that not enough artists have; they all for the most part feel the exact opposite. I think the secret is to only read poets whose first and last names begin with W.

And perhaps not for this publication, but just to ease and calm you my friend, I find this observational poem by Shelley to be life-affirming in its exactness:

Evening, Ponte Al Mare, Pisa

1.

The sun is set; the swallows are asleep;
The bats are flitting fast in the gray air;
The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep,
And evening's breath, wandering here and there
Over the quivering surface of the stream,
Wakes not one ripple from its summer dream.

2.

There is no dew on the dry grass to-night,
Nor damp within the shadow of the trees;
The wind is intermitting, dry, and light;
And in the inconstant motion of the breeze
The dust and straws are driven up and down,
And whirled about the pavement of the town.

3.

Within the surface of the fleeting river
The wrinkled image of the city lay,
Immovably unquiet, and forever
It trembles, but it never fades away;
Go to the [East]
You, being changed, will find it then as now.

4.

The chasm in which the sun has sunk is shut
By darkest barriers of cinereous cloud,
Like mountain over mountain huddled — but
Growing and moving upwards in a crowd,
And over it a space of watery blue,
Which the keen evening star is shining through.

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Click here to purchase The Sky Contains the Plans
at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Little Glass Planet
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2020 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2020