Esteban Rodriguez

[REVIEW] Skin Memory by John Sibley Williams

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Breakwaters Press, 2020

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REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRÍGUEZ

I remember first reading Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo and feeling uneasy for the absence that pervades the novel. The story centers around Juan Preciado and his journey back to his deceased mother’s hometown of Comala, where he hopes to find his father but instead encounters a town populated by ghosts. The novel is surreal, and the way that Comala is described illuminates the tragedies of those who occupied the land. John Sibley William’s Skin Memory might not fall into the precise category of work that Juan Rulfo’s does, but the descriptions of absence in these poems succeed in the same manner, illuminating the consequences of loss, and revealing—if we weren’t aware before—how fragile the world around us truly is.

Skin Memory is a mixture of free verse and prose poems, but in many ways, the distinction between the two poetic forms is secondary to the content and to how much can be said with such concision. In “Sons of No One,” the topics of the poem range from suicide to extinction to the nature of creation:

So far all the suicides have been men

                   in my family. When I draw them

            close, it helps to remember the lake

                   beneath the desert the animals

            cannot taste but know exists.

                     It helps to draw them hungry

            clusters of light loping across the night

                     sky, such flames in their belies.

As the speaker goes on to discuss their naming of the stars, they feel, indirectly, that they had a role in the creation of the world—a feeling the speaker attempts unsuccessfully to achieve because of the lack of control they feel when one male family member after another takes their life. The speaker isn’t helpless as much as they are reflective, trying to understand what exactly is in their grasp and what isn’t. We see this in the next poem “Spectral”:

Each body is an outpost, populating, on its way to becoming a city. How the lights multiply, the surrounding darkness swell: how the moment speaks in future tense: if I’m being honest, how we miss what we never quite had, holding the light up to it- self, saying this is what we needed you to be.

There are certain things that will always live at a distance, and even though we may think that we know someone, and by extension know their body, we find, as Sibley Williams describes, moments where we don’t, and we realize at other moments that this understanding was never something we had a claim to.

This sentiment isn’t exclusive to family and those closest to us, but to the landscape as well, and when put under the microscope, we begin to question our role and purpose on this earth. In “Dear Nowhere,” a poem that traverses Montana, Alaska, and North Texas, we see this firsthand:

{Somewhere in North Texas}

Failing

to separate ground and sky, I’m complicit

in the steady collapse of clouds over barns.

Look—how red they rise from this dry

body of earth.

Is this only body placed on our tongues? Is this blood

we’re washing it all down with? I’m watching

bales of hay unfasten in the distance and wondering

if in another rendering of paradise we wouldn’t be

throwing stones to silence the owls at night.

A cathartic scene prompts the speaker to question their “complicity” in watching the course of events unfold (clouds collapsing, bales of hay unfastening), and in a larger sense, readers can’t help but wonder if the speaker is referring to complicity on more serious issues. After all, how often do we sit back and barely acknowledge the ways in which the world is collapsing all around us? Perhaps this interpretation is stretched, but poetry that engages its readers in this manner and allows such layers of meaning is poetry we need in such a flawed and complicated world.

As much as Skin Memory examines the world at large, it never fails to bring the focus back to the familial, and toward the end of the collection, Sibley Williams reminds us how necessary it is to cherish the small moments that might otherwise be lost to the grander scheme of things:

My son has not yet found a reason to love or hate    the silence     following us around the house. All he knows: something palpable is missing, not yet profound, not yet painting nightmares over his sleep, just a steady lack of arms where arms should be. The hundred nightingales trapped in my chest are chattering all at once. I don’t know which to speak from, if any voice is true, & if I’d recognize it. 

Although the son in “Absence Makes the Heart” is still innocent in a lot of ways, he knows something is not quite right. Sometimes it feels that when nothing wrong is happening then something must be wrong, and the son, almost instinctively, feels this too. But the speaker understands that as his father, and as someone who is still trying to figure out if “any voice is/ true,” he must guide his son in the best way possible, hoping that when the silence is no longer around, his son hears something akin to love.

Perhaps the best way to close out a poetry review for a collection as timely and important as Skin Memory is to let the work speak for itself, and the last poem “Forge” sums up what both the speaker and reader experience when they have reached the end, whatever that ending may be:

             We are here; this happened; a

simple  record.  If  we’re  lucky,  a  catalyst.  One door framed

within another. Even if closure is a construct, I cannot rule out

heaven entirely. Whatever finally breaks me, I cannot refuse it.

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ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ is the author of the collections Dusk & Dust (Hub City Press 2019), Crash Course (Saddle Road Press 2019), In Bloom (SFASU Press 2020), and (Dis)placement (Skull + Wind Press 2020). His poetry has appeared in Boulevard, The Rumpus, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, an Assistant Poetry Editor for AGNI, and a regular reviews contributor for [PANK] and Heavy Feather Review. He lives with his family in Austin, Texas.

[REVIEW] Aria Aber’s HARD DAMAGE

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University of Nebraska Press, 2019

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REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

In an increasingly global society, there are many whose upbringing is centered around two or more cultures, which at times can be in harmony with each other, and at others in conflict. In Aria Aber’s debut collection, Hard Damage, a strong sense of identity lies at the center of each of the worlds explored, with every poem seeking to interrogate the historical and the personal, to flesh out what it means to have a past that impacts the present, and vice versa.

Winner of the 2018 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Hard Damage examines various aspects of the immigrant experience and the manner in which one navigates the complexities of a new life. In the proem “Reading Rilke in Berlin,” the speaker reflects on learning English and her father’s journey to a new country:

Into English I splintered the way my father clutched

his valise at the airport, defeated and un-American.

It took me twelve strange springs to know: nothing

occurs out of a sudden. How do I let it go?

Little has been purloined from me and the ghosts

of childhood still sibilate, by which I mean

nobody has touched me on my innermost parts.

Despite the sense of loss the speaker’s father feels, and that the speaker herself feels by splintering into a language her parents don’t fully know, there is no coming back, and they both must commit themselves to a land and people that are as intrigued as they are indifferent to new inhabitants. When we arrive at the end of the poem, the speaker’s mother responds, rather confidently, with a “fine, ou hare you?” after being asked where she is from, and the speaker, aware of the callous attitude of the immigration officer she encounters, says she wants nothing more than to “[rip] out his tongue/… and [wait]/ for it to bloom new [in her] blood,” thereby fully possessing what at the beginning of the poem wasn’t quite hers.

Although the speaker interrogates the nuances of her identities (Afghan, German, American), there is no denying that she accepts every part of who she is, regardless if part of her upbringing isn’t fully attached to one geographical location. She is not quickly or easily defined, and for others, this concept can be lost on an adherence to stereotypical expectations of what someone should be. One of the most memorable poems in this collection is “The Ownership of Naming Things,” which details what others see the speaker as rather than what she is:

What once was feathered like a voice, a seduction

of finches, now is vigorous, bids me into the sun.

I am not less enough. Once, a man unbuttoned

my spine into the purple noise of night, swore

You’re not like them, look at how light your skin

is.

Her skin may be light, but it doesn’t mean she loses her Afghan identity because of it, and it doesn’t dictate that she should shun what is essential to her being. As she says, quite directly, “I am not / delicate. Look at me. I am not trying to disappear.”

The process of not forgetting takes up the entirety of the third section of the book with the poem “Rilke and I.” The eight sections are titled in both German and English, and they highlight not only the attention to language but the manner in which certain words and phrases shape identities and worldviews. This can be as minuscule as the word “I,” which in the first section captures its implications:

Ich, the German first-person singular pronoun, is not capitalized.

Is my German selfhood humbler, does it fold into itself? Why is the

English I so prominent, so searing on the page?

It could look like an | and therefore like a wall more than a door—

altogether very different from the little ich, which is the scaffolding

of a roof, a cathedral, something to contain the collective.

Putting a microscope to things that might not seem important is at the core of the speaker’s attempt to understand her history better, and to form a new way of looking at what is too often overlooked. Although contemplative and philosophical, Aber’s ability to switch into the narrative provides the perfect balance to insights into the speaker’s past, as shown in “Und/And”:

As children, it’s the only word we use to comprehend continuity. “And

then what?” we ask.

And then we had to leave Afghanistan.

“And then? And then? And then?”

You and I. You, who made me. And = the umbilical cord.

And Mother and Father, at last. Yes, he was there—a distant firefly in

a field; like the traveler that he was, which as the meaning of his last

name, he was always gone, trying to become an American.

Again, a single word is sufficient enough to meditate on what exactly “continuity” entails, and how moments from our life are connected in more ways than we originally thought.

The past here is personal, but it doesn’t entirely exist outside of history. “Operation Cyclone,” titled after the code name of the CIA’s program to arm and finance the mujahideen during the 1980s, interweaves various stories with the reality and consequences of such an operation:

a brother a favorite among his eight siblings

a brother believed to be gone

a brother’s name crossed through, filed away under “collateral”

a cheek held to the soles of the occupation

a country surveilled and censored as X

a cyclone as metaphor

a family collapsing at the grave, the grave empty, the stone etched

with cursive Died: unknown; died believing in good, beloved son,

brother, and uncle

a family cowered at the dinner table thinking of their brother

a family scouring through death lists, searching among the names of

the tortured, the detained and executed for a trace of their brother

a family waiting for news

a father beginning a joke with There’s no Walmart in Afghanistan

a fridge full of light

a funeral willowed and willing

a funeral with sisters wailing like blue jays, flagellating themselves and

each other

a funeral without a body so sober the orchids are flushing

I include this entire stanza because it’s important to read the totality of Aber’s attention to events that most Americans more than likely know nothing about. For the speaker, it’s a truth they must live with constantly, recognizing that she doesn’t want your sympathy, but instead she “want[s] your attention.” Even if that can be bothersome (think of all the people who shed light on unjust issues in order to promote their own brand or because they are merely hopping on a social bandwagon), it’s something that is nevertheless necessary in order excavate every aspect of the truth, regardless of how tragic that truth may be.

Recently, there has been some debate about “Best of” literary lists, whether they are too narrow in their scope or simply biased toward works that have been bestowed with awards, failing to consider the abundance of books that deserves a wider audience. Regardless of where you land in this debate, it’s hard to imagine, as 2019 nears its end, that Hard Damage won’t be on every one of those lists. It’s an incredible achievement that doesn’t sugarcoat the subjects it tackles, and if there is a book that so thoroughly explores the human condition this year, it is undoubtedly Aber’s, one that will move you as much as it will stir serious discussion with others and, most importantly, with yourself.

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ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ is the author of the collections Dusk & Dust (Hub City Press 2019), Crash Course (Saddle Road Press 2019), In Bloom (SFASU Press 2020), and (Dis)placement (Skull + Wind Press 2020). His poetry has appeared in Boulevard, The Rumpus, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, an Assistant Poetry Editor for AGNI, and a regular reviews contributor for [PANK] and Heavy Feather Review. He lives with his family in Austin, Texas.

[TINY REVIEWS] Esteban Rodríguez on Cruz/Randall/Glasglow

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WORDS BY ESTEBAN RODRÍGUEZ

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Dregs by Cynthia Cruz (Four Way Books)

In her fifth collection, Cynthia Cruz’s Dregs explores the remnants of human destruction and how one must navigate the maze of social ambiguity associated with the collapse of everyday structures. Cities are besieged, winters reign and weep inside the world’s inhabitants, and the speaker, absorbed in this half-lucid dream of longing and death, enters, page after page, an array of abandoned settings, searching for meaning where there appears to be none. With a concise, lyrical, and surreal poetic style, Dregs reads as a kind of post-apocalyptic catalog of how we’ve been “Forever changed // By the sickening poverty / Of sorrow.” Just over fifty pages, Dregs is a relatively quick read, but the images are haunting, and with death lingering at the end of every poem, Cruz is sure to leave you pondering your own existence long after you’ve put the book down.

 

Refuse by Julian Randall (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Winner of the 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Julian Randall’s Refuse explores identity, binaries, masculinity, sexuality, family, and the politics and social constructs that govern our relationship with ourselves and others. These poems don’t attempt to sugarcoat its themes and subjects, but they don’t sacrifice lyricism, emotion, and a much needed urgency at the expense of chipping away at a greater truth. Additionally, Randall captures moments that become meditative explorations of what it means be black (and biracial) within the frame of societal expectations. For example, the poem “Fright Night Lights #20” details a football teammate’s pectoral tear while bench pressing. The speaker helps his teammate to the office, but while at the office, as the staff studies them, he begins to fear the “slow guillotine   the brief blade / of a white woman’s smile” and how quickly that gaze can become something both distressing and dangerous. The collection is bold and unapologetic, a debut that shows Randall’s promising career as a poet and a curator of the issues that deserve to be confronted and revealed to a wider audience.

deciduous qween by Matty Layne Glasglow (Red Hen Press)

Selected by Richard Blanco as the winner of the 2018 Benjamin Saltman Award, Matty Lane Glasglow’s deciduous qween is a vibrant collection that examines the queer world around us and how environments influence and shape our understanding of identity, sexuality, and of the perceptions we have of our bodies and character. In many of the poems, Glasglow takes small moments from the past and meditates on their importance in the present. In “deciduous qween, II,” for example, the speaker reflects on his first performance “prancing around [the] living room / in a Mickey Mouse onesie,” and through lyrical musings on that event, is able to accept who they always knew they were:

That afternoon, I felt sparkling silver gleam

sprout from my skull like all my bones were

precious metal, & I just wanted to let them

shine, to let anyone hold my body in the light

so I could look like I was worth something.

deciduous qween delves deep into this question of worth, the value of knowing who we are and who we want to be. To quote Eduardo C. Corral, “Vulnerability, brashness, grief, and astonishment leap off the page,” and there is no doubt that you too will find yourself within the pages of this book, and with the same glamor, glory, and glitter and make these poems important and memorable, you’ll have no choice but to “Let your crown shine.”

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Esteban Rodríguez is the author of Dusk & Dust, forthcoming from Hub City Press (September 2019). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives with his family and teaches in Austin, Texas.

[REVIEW] The Geese Who Might Be Gods by Benjamin Cutler

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(Main Street Rag, 2019)

REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

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For many poetry collections, the theme of place is central to the images, ideas, and emotions they seek to instill in their readers. In the book Romey’s Order, Atsuro Riley couples a unique regional dialect with the memories of growing up in the backwoods of South Carolina to create a rich and highly percussive collection. In the work of B.H. Fairchild, the Midwest – both its people and the landscape – shapes the speaker’s understanding of not only the region, but the world at large. For Benjamin Cutler, southern Appalachia courses through the veins of his debut collection, The Geese Who Might Be Gods, and with a voice that is clear, lyrical, and maturely measured, we are gifted with poems that are both beautiful and hauntingly memorable.

The beauty of Cutler’s collection lies in its ability to weave the historical with the personal, and to create a narrative where the understanding for a greater truth is found in the relationship between the two. In the opening poem “Peeling Bark for Bread,” the speaker ponders a documentary that details the Sami people (from Scandinavia) and the manner in which they’d peel bark and grind it into flour. This rather random fact inspires the speaker to do the same to their mother’s dogwood, albeit unsuccessfully. The mother, “in grief and rage,” laments the speaker’s actions, but when the splintered edges grow back within the year, the “leavened loaves under the sun” remind both speaker and mother (and reader as well) how wounds can heal and eventually flourish.Many poems center on familial relationships, either through the frame of the speaker’s childhood or through the eyes of the speaker as a father. In one poem, the speaker remembers turning to his brother and his brother’s friend to help fix a lawnmower, and when these two “shamans garbed in grease / and denim” have resurrected this “child” (the lawnmower), the idea that family serves as a foundation and backbone to one’s own needs is illuminated in a subtle yet thoughtful tone. In “Butterfly Funeral,” the speaker, now a father, shows his son how certain moments require our attention and care rather than the more common act of capturing a scene through a photograph:

See their color:

a spill of ink on yellow paper.

See their movement:

wings like hands opening

and closing in uncertain prayer.

 

Remember so you can tell her:

they’ll be gone when we pass again.

 

Looks like a butterfly funeral,

 

he said and—

with such reverence—

 

brushed one finger

over on attendant’s wings.

 

It shuddered but did not fly.

 

These poems are heartfelt, but without falling into the trap of being overly sentimental. Page after page, Cutler seeks to create images filled with emotional and intellectual nuance, delving into subjects such as A.L.S. (“How to Speak With the Dying When the Dying Cannot Speak”), grief in the wake of a school shooting (“A Refusal”), and the anxiety surrounding survival should the world enter its last stages (“A Tomato Sandwich for the End-Times”).

One of the most intriguing aspects of These Geese Who Might Be Gods is how Cutler can take a seemingly grotesque image and find meaning that isn’t apparent on the surface. In “Bear Paw,” the speaker finds a “fraction of a crucifixion – / a single [bear] paw nailed to a telephone pole.” After bathing in a shallow pool, he returns to the paw and ponders the last moments before its death:

How heavy he must have fallen,

how silent and still

 

as blade cut through radius,

tendon, and ulna—as spike

pierced the palm’s pad, paw

 

lifted high for a sign:

flesh as dark and bloodless as guilt,

bone as pale and dry as forgiveness.

 

There’s a certain sense of guilt that the speaker feels for the bear, wondering if it experienced defiance or fear before it was killed. Nevertheless, the speaker ultimately feels cleansed (or forgiven) of having to witness the aftermath of such a strange, brutal act. Even when the images are not based in reality, they remain stark and offer a chance at greater reflection. In “Waking From Tooth-Loss,” the speaker navigates a dream where his teeth fall out and expose “nerve / and purple-blooded absence.” He doesn’t know exactly what it means that he’s losing teeth so rapidly in a dream (some interpretations of this would indicate that it symbolizes anxiety and the way we think we are perceived by others), but he knows that once he has awakened, he cannot regain the feeling – however ominous it is – he had when he was asleep:

But now that I’m awake,

I have forgotten the secret.

Now that I’m awake,

my teeth are here, rooted to bone,

and you are not.

I cannot ask. You cannot answer.

Hurry your return,

if you can, because soon I will swallow

something that tastes

too much like loss.

These teeth are tired of chewing.

The “you” comes in unexpectedly, but it can be in reference to the “I” that the speaker left behind in the dream (a separation, if you will, that he experienced when he woke up), and this loss, this constant “chewing” of everyday life, reveals that there are always moments out of our grasp, those we can only hope to retell.

There are debuts that are good and there are debuts that are great precisely because they remind you of the power of poetry and how important it is in capturing the environment, the people, and the moments that shape our most basic understanding of this world. The Geese Who Might Be Gods is an incredible book that examines our relationship with nature, loss, family, and with ourselves, and with that “endless hungry search” for meaning, we find light in these pages where we least expect it.

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Esteban Rodríguez is the author of Dusk & Dust, forthcoming from Hub City Press (September 2019). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives with his family and teaches in Austin, Texas.

[REVIEW] Lima : : Limón by Natalie Scenters-Zapico

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(Copper Canyon Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

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One only needs to look at the current debate regarding reproductive rights in various state chambers across this country to see that there are still political parties and groups that want to limit the legal and social rights and privileges of women, convinced the gap that exists between them and their male counterparts need not be closed. It’s a tiresome fact, and how we as a society view the female body leaves politicians, pundits, and those closest to us with no shortage of opinions. If, however, we believe that literature has the power to spark change, then we must also believe that it acts as a tool to help curate a history we want to leave for future generations, especially if certain narratives don’t align with the realities of marginalized and underrepresented voices. Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s Lima::Limón is not just a collection of poetry, but a conversation that seeks to explore gender roles, machismo, and the figurative and literal borders that simultaneously constrain and liberate the body and its desires.

The collection begins as a snapshot of innocence, with the speaker of the poem “Lima:: Limón: Infancia” explaining that she “wants to be the lemons in the bowl/on the cover of the magazine.” This picturesque image doesn’t last long, however, and three poems later, the speaker is in a completely differently situation, devoid of any still-life serenity.

I lie on my back in the grass & let the weight

of a man on top of me. Out of breath, he searches

for a place on my body that hasn’t flooded.

The only dry patch left is my hair, which he uses

to wipe the sweat from his face. He is disgusted

because I have turned the earth beneath us

damp. He says I am an experience, like standing

in an irrigated grove of lemon trees.

The “man” here, both a specific man and a composite of other men, is dissatisfied with the body in front of him, searching for what hasn’t already be explored and occupied. It sounds harsh using such terms, but that discomfort is what Scenters-Zapico is pushing us toward, and it doesn’t relent when the man says that the speaker’s “moisture/brings mold & [her] body is nauseating.” The image of the lemon enters near the end of the poem, but we are no longer seeing it in the same light as earlier. What was once a symbol of opportunity and tranquility is now an object that is processed for someone else’s pleasure and consumption.

Although the occurrence above might seem mutual (even though there are hints that it is anything but), the speaker, at other times, must ward off men who believe that anything can be bought.

My landscape of curves & edges

that breaks light spectral

 

is not for sale, but men still knock

on rib after rib, stalking the perfect house –

There is a violence here, and that desire to invade and claim the female body, as if it were real estate, is prevalent throughout. Often times, it’s implicit–a husband criticizing his wife for attempting to surprise him for his birthday by jumping out of a cake; a woman laughing at jokes at her own expense in order to maintain a “porcelain doll” image in her household–but there are poems when this violence is visible, and none other is more direct than “More Than One Man Has Reached Up My Skirt.” The speaker recognizes that she has given up protesting not only the act from which the poem takes its title, but other things: catcalling, being seen exclusively as a servant, and even the guilt that comes with having to resort to an abortion. Despite this, the speaker finds herself “lucky” due to the fact that “other girls/work in maquilas” or “work in brothels” or “are found/wearing clothes/that don’t belong to them, or no/clothes at all” or “are found/with puta/written in blood across/their broken bellies.” The speaker, remembering a conversation with her mother and how she used to cover her eyes when they encountered girls working the corner, states that yes, she is “very lucky,” but whether she believes it is a different question entirely. How can a woman truly claim prosperity when the social, economic, and legal forces that govern what women can and cannot do are consistently acting upon her? The answer obviously is that she can’t, since institutions, although favorable to certain races and classes of women, are still a part of the patriarchy, one that actively seeks to control how much “luck” women have in their everyday lives.

It’s ironic that after various violent encounters, the man in certain poems returns to the speaker, unwilling to leave her for fear – we can assume – of being lonely, being emasculated, and of completely breaking who they feel is their right to control. In the poem “Notes on My Present: A Contrapuntal,” the speaker so aptly questions, “How do you write about the violence/ of every man you’ve ever loved?” This is not easy to answer, but Scenters-Zapico has found a way, and it’s fitting that one of the last poems of the collection ends with a mother detailing her advice to her daughters, hoping, perhaps, that she can prepared them enough to not ever have to ask such a question. She warns about police, about taking an exam without a social security number, about men who want to hurt them just for the sake of seeing them suffer, and emphasizes that despite all that life throws their way, they have “good bones/ for hard work” and shouldn’t be ashamed, just as we as readers shouldn’t be either, to try to “make this place beautiful.” Scenters-Zapico has offered us something to help with that; we in turn must do our part to continue unveiling the cruel reality marginalized women face, and bring it to the forefront of conversations we have on how to leave the world better than we found it.

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Esteban Rodríguez is the author of Dusk & Dust, forthcoming from Hub City Press (September 2019). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives with his family and teaches in Austin, Texas.

[REVIEW] Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen

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(Omnidawn, 2018)

REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

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To quote a phrase from Terrance Hayes’s foreword, Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen is a collection of “exile and elegy.” The poem’s first line proclaims there “is no ecologically safe way to mourn,” and because there isn’t, at least not within the collection’s context of loss, the search for identity, and the acclimation to a culture of a new country, Nguyen so confidently writes in a style and voice that is as innovative as it is maturely aware of its subjects and themes.

Two pages in, and we are introduced to one of the collection’s most intriguing forms; “Triptych” (the title of five other poems in this collection) is composed of an altered, blurred photograph of a family (Nguyen’s own) with a piece missing (which Nguyen’s brother cut himself before his death), followed by a fragmented poem (taking the shape of that figure), and a prose poem that seeks to illuminate the meaning behind the photo and the previous poem. Although a form like this runs the risk of seeming forced, and can look to an experienced reader like something the poet learned in a workshop and was excited to put on the page (think of all the poorly constructed ghazals that randomly show up in a collection that doesn’t need them and that don’t fit with the poet’s overall style), Nguyen is able to use this form in a manner that is never superficial. The beauty of these poems lies in the seemingly chaotic nature they take as the collection progresses. By the fourth “Triptych,” the photograph is altered to the point of nausea, and the fragmented poem that follows singles out the speaker’s brother, Oliver, as a figure so far removed from anything that resembles that serene family in the photo before:

Re

mem

ber the

handsom

e boy pla

ying ball i

n the decay

ed city? Thin

k about him

how he’s pla

ying and pla

ying not as

king a singl

e question,

think abou

t that how

My replication here doesn’t do the justice to what the reader will experience firsthand with these poems, nor will any replication successfully capture the essence of the “Gyotaku” poems (Gyotaku is a Japanese form of printmaking that uses fish or other sea animals as printing plates). These poems are more vibrant and visually jarring as Nguyen prints her text onto the altered photographs. In one instance, the name “oliver” (shaped into a disembodied figure) is juxtaposed next to the cut portion of a family portrait and then splashed in various trail-like patterns across the next page, all in different shades of black and gray. Such a technique recreates the footprint the speaker’s brother left behind. The speaker, through these pieces, copes with these memories, and the page offers no better canvas to visually express the labyrinth of emotions still fresh after such a loss. Near the end of the collection (in the last “Gyotaku” poem), multiple lines of olivers (printed in light gray) occupy the whole page, while a poem in the shape of dark figure lingers the right hand corner, as though the ghost or spirit has nowhere to go, stuck in a two-dimensional limbo that prompts the speaker to ponder how it’s “not the body/but the self that is/a suffering form.”

In no way should anyone confuse these poems as a cheap substitute for the language Nguyen achieves in the book’s more “traditional” poems. In “I Keep Getting Things Wrong,” the speaker reflects on their parents’ exile from Vietnam to the United States. The speaker’s father is depicted with deity-like qualities, giving “his hand to his mother,/[while] all around them, a thousand hands reach up” for salvation. The father leaves Saigon unscathed, resettling in Southern California. But such happiness doesn’t last long, and the speaker’s brother’s death inserts itself in the present as much as it does the past. The speaker feels inclined to “eat the food/left out for [her] dead brother” and at one point, while sitting at a desk typing, remembers that she dreamed twice that she “fucked” him. The speaker cannot escape what so painfully plagues her, and though for some it might be exhausting to read, the subject is reformulated in ways that allow for greater understanding, empathy, and reflection.

In other poems, the speaker imagines herself as a house occupied with emptiness and guilt, or envisions a world where she pours pieces of herself into a dog (not that the dog has any particular significance other than being an entity in which the speaker’s desires can be projected and potentially take form). Nguyen’s poems also extend to lyric narratives. The poem “Ghost Of” recounts a family’s history, detailing what appears on the surface to be trivial matters (how parents came about naming their son, how a young daughter walks around pigeon-toed, how seat belts enumerate a mother’s failures), but that ultimately shed light on the complexity of this “story of refugees” (a subject that is all too relevant in today’s social and political landscape). Ghost Of carefully moves at a pace that is thoughtful, innovative, and elegiac, and never once shies away from speaking about death in a manner that is both personal and universal. After all, as Nguyen so aptly puts it, in times such as these, “there is no shortage of gain or loss.”

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Esteban Rodriguez is a poet and teacher. He is the author of DUSK & DUST,  forthcoming from Hub City Press.