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Vuong Song

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Ocean Vuong’s book On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is listed as “a novel” on the cover, but you know how genre goes these days. I can say with some confidence that it is not straight-up poetry like Night Sky with Exit Wounds, but I’d peg it more memoir than novel. Call me traditional.

The conceit is a series of letters from a young Vietnamese man to his mother, who cannot read. Proceeding chronologically, it starts when the letter-writer is a young boy in the familiar (to me) city of Hartford. (And how neat to see Franklin Avenue appear on its pages!)

Novel, memoir, hybrid, there’s no denying this is prose. But it is poetic prose, so if you’re hankering for a book of poetry, you should have no problem diving into an ocean of this kind.

For example, here is a paragraph taken from p. 12 in the text:

You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty. Opening the front door to the firs snowfall of my life, you whispered, “Look.”

If you’re thinking these lovely lines of prose could easily be rearranged into a short stanza of poetry, you’re thinking like me. Whoever thinks of an eye as something god cares about, much less as his “loneliest creation,” is thinking in a novel way. No, wait. A poetic way.

And it’s almost aphoristic when Vuong writes “the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing.” Antithetical wisdom, that.

Then the bit about the other eye, unaware of the first, “just as hungry, as empty.” Nice. And finally, in a concrete example of all this poetic abstraction, his mother opens the door to the first snowfall so his young and hungry eyes can fill their emptiness with wonder.

Two pages later, the end of this chapter features a one-line, one-word paragraph—the word “Look.”

We may be briefly gorgeous here on Earth, but our prose can be gorgeous much, much longer. But don’t take my word for it. Read for yourself.

Poems About Sons & Daughters

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Having kids (or, as the cynical might say, “debt drivers”). It isn’t easy, especially for mothers who truly have to have the kids. Physically. Painfully. Emotionally.

But after that, I mean. Through the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the serene and the scary.

In the end, a parent hopes her child will do better than her in every way, and that the world bestowed to the child will be better, too. In the beginning, the parent will kid herself about kids and suppose that it will all go storybook.

Or the opposite. The imaginative parent might worry about the worst that could happen. All those gruesome things you read in the newspaper while saying to yourself, “Oh my God. The depravity of it all.” Depravity = a world overrun by power-hungry, war-mongering despots of every stripe — men (most always) who bring death and ruin on innocent men, women, and children in other countries under some excuse or other (of which they have plenty).

Or a world of crime. Of huge economic disparities. Of disease and hunger.

When it comes to worrying, where does it end? It’s enough to drive a poet to write. Or cry, as Ellen Bass did after her daughter’s marriage.

Think about it. The long and winding road you travel from a baby’s first breath to her marriage. And it doesn’t end there because your baby will always be your baby. Until the day you die, which you pray will be before any child of yours does.

Note the interesting way Ellen describes her emotions in this daughter-driven poem below:

 

After Our Daughter’s Wedding
Ellen Bass

While the remnants of cake
and half-empty champagne glasses
lay on the lawn like sunbathers lingering
in the slanting light, we left the house guests
and drove to Antonelli’s pond.
On a log by the bank I sat in my flowered dress and cried.
A lone fisherman drifted by, casting his ribbon of light.
“Do you feel like you’ve given her away?” you asked.
But no, it was that she made it
to here, that she didn’t
drown in a well or die
of pneumonia or take the pills.
She wasn’t crushed
under the mammoth wheels of a semi
on highway 17, wasn’t found
lying in the alley
that night after rehearsal
when I got the time wrong.
It’s animal. The egg
not eaten by a weasel. Turtles
crossing the beach, exposed
in the moonlight. And we
have so few to start with.
And that long gestation—
like carrying your soul out in front of you.
All those years of feeding
and watching. The vulnerable hollow
at the back of the neck. Never knowing
what could pick them off—a seagull
swooping down for a clam.
Our most basic imperative:
for them to survive.
And there’s never been a moment
we could count on it.

 

The poem has ideas about becoming a list poem (the ways things can go wrong), but instead takes a right turn at the philosophical four-way stop (starting with “It’s animal.”). Then come the metaphorical riffs on predator and prey, on Darwin’s cruel world.

Thank goodness animal parents don’t ruminate like this. If they did, nature would be filled with one long dirge.

But that’s the thing about kids. They are adept at inspiring both joy and despair. The opposing forces flourish equally under their skin.

Debt drivers, nothing. They’re poetry drivers as well. Think about it. Then write about it. The poem will be yet another “kid” (I kid you not).

Poems That Stick

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crow

For many decades, I was a plainclothes reader of poetry. I took a course at university, like people do, but wasn’t terribly impressed. Still, impressions were made. A few poems, for reasons quirky to me, stuck. That is, I remembered certain lines and, like stubborn lint that’s taken up residence in wool, they refused to give. Strands of them took up permanent residency in those out-of-the-way lobes of my brain.

One “sticker” was some poem a guy wrote about his cat, Jeoffrey. Perhaps it was the poem. Perhaps it was the idea that a poet would riff for an entire poem on his cat. And I’m a dog guy, so don’t get it in your head that I like the poem because I watch inane youtube videos about kitties. This poem transcends all that silliness.

The poem in question? “For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffrey” by Christopher “Really” Smart, a guy who spent seven years in an insane asylum (while Jeoffrey ran affairs back home, no doubt). A taste (brace yourself for a strong dose of anaphora):

 

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. 
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he’s a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord’s poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually–Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire.
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep. 

 

To qualify as a “stick” poem, the poem doesn’t have to be remembered whole hog. Oh, no. One line will do. The best example is a two-word line from a poem that I frequently mutter as I look up at raucous crows in the sky, on tree limbs, or on the peak of the roof. It is, simply, “Pass, crow.” The words rattle like two marbles in the empty cup of my mind every time I see my dark-feathered friends.

And what a lovely conceit! I mean, the very thought of man commanding crow! If crows appear to laugh, their heads bobbing with due caws, this final line from this poem is the reason. Ted Hughes, a crow specialist, is the deluded poet:

 

“Examination at the Womb-Door”

Who owns those scrawny little feet?    Death.
Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face?    Death.
Who owns these still-working lungs?    Death.
Who owns this utility coat of muscles?    Death.
Who owns these unspeakable guts?    Death.
Who owns these questionable brains?    Death.
All this messy blood?    Death.
These minimum-efficiency eyes?    Death.
This wicked little tongue?    Death.
This occasional wakefulness?    Death.

Given, stolen, or held pending trial?
Held.

Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth?    Death.
Who owns all of space?    Death.

Who is stronger than hope?    Death.
Who is stronger than the will?    Death.
Stronger than love?    Death.
Stronger than life?    Death.

But who is stronger than Death?
                          Me, evidently.
Pass, Crow.

 

Of course, you cannot be a registered reader of American poetry if you don’t have some Frost covering the frozen grass of your mind. For me, it’s two lines: “Whose woods these are I think I know” (though, like Frost, I don’t really) and “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.”

If the roads had diverged in a red wood, it wouldn’t work as well. Yes, it’d be a nod to Frost’s birth state of California, but memorable? No. It may be read multiple times, but it just wouldn’t stick.

I should know. I’ve been going left at every fork in a yellow wood I’ve come across. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?

“Murder Your Darlings”

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terry-mcdonell

Murder your darlings. Famous words in writing, where the judge (that’s writers like me) tends to grant words clemency a bit more often than advisable.

In reading famous editor Terry McDonell’s The Accidental Life, I came across a small section that serves as wisdom not only for prose writers but for the non-prose sorts in his audience as well, the poets and the dreamers.

Let’s listen in:

“Avoid clichés like the plague, and no matter how amazing or incredible or unbelievable anything is, know how challenging it can be to raise the bar–even when you are writing about icons living in La La Land or Tinseltown or on the Left Coast.

“Likewise it is prudent to take Kurt Vonnegut’s advice: ‘Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.’

“Think like Mark Twain: ‘When you catch an adjective, kill it.’

“‘Kill your darlings’ means cut anything precious, overly clever, or self-indulgent. It is a stark, brilliant prohibition attributed most often to William Faulkner but also to Allen Ginsberg, Oscar Wilde, Eudora Welty, G. K. Chesterton, Anton Chekhov and Stephen King, who used the phrase in his effusive On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft: ‘Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.’

“When the 2013 biopic of Allen Ginsberg, Kill Your Darlings, came out, Forrest Wickman on Slate tracked what is probably the best attribution to Arthur Quiller-Couch in his 1914 Cambridge lecture ‘On Style.’ The prolific poet, novelist and critic railed against ‘extraneous Ornament’ and emphasized, ‘If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it–wholeheartedly–and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.‘

“Wickman’s research also brought him to an even more important rule for journalists: ‘Check your sources.'”

— p. 70 “Editcraft”

How Do I Hate Thee? Let Me Count the Ways.

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In a world with so much to hate, why not turn it into a cash crop? Why not have some fun with it?

Why not hate the trivial, for instance? Or the ridiculous? Or the usually-overlooked-when-we-think-of-hating, maybe?

I guess these questions went through the mind of Laure-Anne Bosselaar when she penned a poem called “The Pleasures of Hating.” For starters, the title grabs even the most distracted reader by the lapel and reels him in.

Hating? I majored in that at university, the reader confesses! Graduated summa cum laude, which is Latin for “to the point of showing off.”

So why not start with Mozart? Everyone hates Mozart, right? Eine Kleine Nacht-Hatred. And what about broccoli? Chain saws? Surely patchouli!

And so it goes, till you, the reader, are in on the joke and wishing you, too, could make a ridiculous list to hate. (I would, but I hate lists.)

But enough. Let’s take Bosselaar’s pleasure ride down the River Stynxs:

 

The Pleasures of Hating
Laure-Anne Bosselaar

I hate Mozart. Hate him with that healthy
pleasure one feels when exasperation has

crescendoed, when lungs, heart, throat,
and voice explode at once: I hate that! —

there’s bliss in this, rapture. My shrink
tried to disabuse me, convinced I use Amadeus

as a prop: Think further; your father perhaps?
I won’t go back, think of the shrink

with a powdered wig, pinched lips, mole:
a transference, he’d say, a relapse: so be it.

I hate broccoli, chain saws, patchouli, bra-
clasps that draw dents in your back, roadblocks,

men in black kneesocks, sandals and shorts —
I love hating that. Loathe stickers on tomatoes,

jerky, deconstruction, nazis, doilies. I delight
in detesting. And love loving so much after that.

 

I suppose the greatest pleasure of all might come in the last line, the way Bosselaar sneaks in a rabbit punch for love, because no matter how boundless your hatred seems to be, it still leaves an entire sea of love by way of contrast.

Just stay away from the nightly news, OK?

Inspired by Water: One If By Lake, Two If By Sea

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Vacation. For students, its special meaning lies in summer, the granddaddy of all vacations. For adults, however, it’s more narrow. Most full-time workers enjoy but 2 to 4 weeks of paid vacation each year. Compared to the nine-week wonder of childhood, slim provisions indeed.

Conjuring vacations of your childhood is sure to bring back a host of disparate memories. You’ll remember some close to home. You’ll recall a few long-distance car rides. And, if you’re lucky, you might reminisce about a certain long flight to some exotic location.

As fodder for writing, vacations are fertile ground. Water figures largely. Melville-like, we are drawn to the sea (it says so in Moby-Dick, after all). And E.B. White-like, we are drawn to the lakes (check out his beautiful essay, “Once More to the Lake”).

Marge Piercy uses lake vacations for material in her aptly-titled poem below. You can, too, by writing down the memories and the imagery that come to mind when you think of a childhood vacation. Once that’s done, you reach the “If you write it, they will come” phase, wherein metaphors come marching out of the water to give your draft some substance.

Here’s inspiration, Piercy’s last draft:

 

The Rented Lakes of My Childhood
Marge Piercy

I remember the lakes of my Michigan
childhood. Here they are called ponds.
Lakes belonged to summer, two-week
vacations that my father was granted by
Westinghouse when we rented some cabin.

Never mind the dishes with spiderweb
cracks, the crooked aluminum sauce
pans, the crusted black frying pans.
Never mind the mattresses shaped
like the letter V. Old jangling springs.

Moldy bathrooms. Low ceilings
that leaked. The lakes were mysteries
of sand and filmy weeds and minnows
flickering through my fingers. I rowed
into freedom. Alone on the water

that freckled into small ripples,
that raised its hackles in storms,
that lay glassy at twilight reflecting
the sunset then sucking up the dark,
I was unobserved as the quiet doe

coming with her fauns to drink
on the opposite shore. I let the row-
boat drift as the current pleased, lying
faceup like a photographer’s plate
the rising moon turned to a ghost.

And though the voices called me
back to the rented space we shared
I was sure I left my real self there—
a tiny black pupil in the immense
eye of a silver pool of silence.

 

I’m sure the Michigan lakes of Piercy lore are the same as the New Hampshire and Maine lakes of Craft lore. Lake or ocean, water is unique yet universal, a perfect brew for the inspiration-sipping writer.

Notice the imagery Piercy uses in stanzas 2 through 5, some of them indoor images, others outdoor. Notice, too, how it sets up the grand finale at the end. Like Fourth of July fireworks, endings often riff off concrete goods to offer an abstract bang. Here it comes in the form of metaphor, the narrator as a pupil (double meaning!) in the “eye of a silver pool of silence.”

So nice. So lake-like. A meditation compliments of the silently-lovely past.

Waiting for Ideas (vs. Godot)

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spaniel

Sometimes waiting for an idea for a poem is like waiting for Godot–some kind of existential joke. You can see Beckett and Camus laughing in the barn. Or Sartre’s mirthful eyes through his thick glasses. Or angst from the corner of your wary eye. But after a while, you grow impatient, and if there’s one thing poets need as much as doctors, it’s patience. (See what I did there?)

So I flipped open good old Ted Kooser’s good old how-to book, The Poetry Home Repair Manual, to the section titled “But How Do You Come Up With Ideas?”  A reading, then, chapter and verse:

“The poet Jane Hirshfield wrote: ‘A work of art defines itself into being, when we awaken into it and by it, when we are moved, altered, stirred. It feels as if we have done nothing, only given it a little time, a little space; some hairline-narrow crack opens in the self, and there it is.’ She goes on to quote Kafka: ‘You do not even have to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, remain still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you unasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.'”

A lovely image, that. The world rolling at your feet like a submissive spaniel. An idea fetching you a stick called “brilliant poem.” And all because you waited, because you said to the Muse, “Sit!” then “Stay!” and finally, just to show off, “Heel!”

See how easy? You may now begin writing. About spaniels. About advice. About white space being eaten up by letters like homework being eaten by the dog. And so forth.

The Hidden Thoreau in Anton Chekhov

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If you come to an Anton Chekhov short story looking for a plot, you’ve come to the wrong place. If you read Chekhov and fret that nothing ever happens, you’d best reconsider your definition of “nothing.”

These thoughts reoccurred to me while rereading some stories in the Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky translation of Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov. I found it good medicine, especially for a poet, to swim in the Russian master’s pool.

Chekhov is a perfect example of my pet theory about literature: almost all of it is a riff on Henry David Thoreau’s famous line, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I even used Henry’s line as an epigraph to my first poetry collection, The Indifferent World.

Less literary but surely related to Thoreau’s line from Essays on Civil Disobedience is a title from the Irish band U2’s song: “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” To my mind, they go hand in hand. Man searches as if there is something — some source of happiness in life — missing, but it is always somewhere ahead of him, just out of reach. It is, in fact, the source of his quiet desperation.

This afflicts even the characters we least expect it from. Contemporary story writer Peter Orner considers “The Bishop” to be Chekhov’s best story, and it is the penultimate tale in the collection I just finished.

And yes, even the bishop, a respected and revered figure in the Russian Orthodox Church, is visited by doubt in the night. Even the bishop is bedeviled by both the past and the future while musing on the present.

It seems we can find a paragraph like the one below in most any Chekhov short story. The moment of truth. Let’s jump into the mind of the bishop, who is listening from his sickbed to the singing of monks in the church. As notes to the story explain, the songs he hears are “words from hymns sung during the services known as ‘Bridegroom services’ celebrated on the first three days of Holy Week.”

 

In the evening the monks sang harmoniously, inspiredly, the office was celebrated by a young hieromonk with a black beard; and the bishop, listening to the verses about the Bridegroom who cometh at midnight and about the chamber that is adorned, felt, not repentance for his sins, not sorrow, but inner peace, silence, and was carried in his thoughts into the distant past, into his childhood and youth, when they had also sung about the Bridegroom and the chamber, and now that past appeared alive, beautiful, joyful, as it probably never had been. And perhaps in the other world, in the other life, we shall remember the distant past, our life here, with the same feelings. Who knows? The bishop sat in the sanctuary, it was dark there. Tears flowed down his face. He was thinking that here he had achieved everything possible for a man in his position, he had faith, and yet not everything was clear, something was still lacking, he did not want to die; and it still seemed that there was some most important thing which he did not have, of which he had once vaguely dreamed, and in the present he was stirred by the same hope for the future that he had had in childhood, and in the academy, and abroad.

“They’re singing so well today!” he thought, listening to the choir. “So well!”

 

I love how the abstract musings are bookended by the actual moment of singing. And how Chekhov hits on our habit of laundering our own pasts of all its ills until childhood seems like the perfect world it surely wasn’t. And how a man of faith in a high office is left, like the rest of us, with stark questions about the afterlife and the purpose of our existence.

In short, this bishop still hasn’t found what he’s looking for and never will, because that, Chekhov seems to say, is what life is all about. That is the quiet desperation we each inherit and wrestle with when we dare engage our thoughts with such thoughts.

You might be tempted to brand Chekhov a downer and say all these desperate characters are the products of a decidedly cynical man, and yet story after story provides glimpses of life’s beauty (see above, where moments from childhood are called “alive, beautiful, joyful”).

And then the ends of the stories come, often with inconsequential, quotidian observations about the setting or with a banal point about goings on around the character. Life goes on, Chekhov tells us, but neat endings and bow-tied resolutions are rarities.

And yes, we will be forgotten soon after we’re gone. And yes, others will experience the same joys and moments of quiet desperation we did, but how many would trade the journey away?

For Chekhov, ultimately, life is worth its tribulations. We readers should know — it was the wellspring of his art.

The Child of Your Rainy Sundays

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When you pick up a novel you read years ago, threads of narrative fabric stand out, looking somewhat familiar to you. Not so the poetry collection. If you’ve read it once, a year ago or more, chances are it will feel new to you as you read it again. A gift, then! Further testament to the mysteries of poetry.

Yesterday I pulled Simic’s That Little Something from the shelf as a tonic after watching a little too much of the evening news featuring our Leader, Pinocchio (what a dummy!). Effects were remarkable, swift, and salubrious!

Reinvigorated, I enjoyed the tranquil poem “To Boredom.” (Ah, for the good old days, when one could afford to be less vigilant about democracy being stolen from under your feet!)

 

To Boredom
by Charles Simic

I’m the child of your rainy Sundays.
I watched time crawl
Over the ceiling
Like a wounded fly.

A day would last forever,
Making pellets of bread,
Waiting for a branch
On a bare tree to move.

The silence would deepen,
The sky would darken,
As Grandmother knitted
With a ball of black yarn.

Heaven is like that.
In eternity’s classrooms,
The angels sit like bored children
With their heads bowed.

 

As former students, I’m sure we can all relate to “eternity’s classrooms,” especially in a poem called “To Boredom.” Few classrooms, after all, were capable of escaping so swift a predator as eternity. (We’ll see for ourselves some day, I assure you!)

 

“I Love So Many Things I Have Never Touched”

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In her collection Obit, Victoria Chang takes the journalistic standard we call an obituary and puts it through some poetic paces. For most of the book, each poem looks like a column in a newspaper, forgoing stanzas for one tall rectangular block. And while the starting point may be the stroke and death of her father followed by the death of her mother, her poems take matters a step further.

How? The Table of Contents foreshadows how: Title-less poems commemorate her father’s frontal lobe, voice mail, language, future, civility, privacy, and her mother’s lungs, teeth, friendships, gait, optimism, ambition, memory, tears, etc. Some of the poems are repeat-obits, including ones for Victoria Chang, the author herself, who feels beleaguered and fundamentally transformed by grief and its effects.

To give the reader occasional breathers, Chang includes a series of tankas throughout. Then there is Section II: “I Am a Miner. The Light Burns Blue,” where she forsakes the middle tower spaces of the page used for obits and writes poems that expand to the entire page, using white spaces between single words or small clumps of words, forcing the reader to slow down and carefully pick through the wreckage death scatters like so much flotsam and jetsam.

For this to work (and it does), the poet has to be both confident (check) and accomplished (check) with personification. Let’s look, for instance, at Chang’s obituary for Approval:

 

Approval – died on August 3, 2015
at the age of 44. It died at 7:07 a.m.
How much money will you get was my
mother’s response to everything. She
used to wrap muffins in a napkin at
the buffet and put them in her purse.
I never saw the muffins again. What I
would do to see those muffins again,
the thin moist thread as she pulled the
muffin apart. A photo shows my mother
holding my hand. I was nine. I never
touched her hand again. Until the day
before she died. I love so many things I
have never touched: the moon, a shiver,
my mother’s heart. Her fingers felt like
rough branches covered with plastic. I
trimmed her nails one by one while the
morphine kept her asleep. Her nails
weren’t small moons or golden doors
to somewhere, but ten last words I was
cutting off.

 

As Chang writes obituaries for abstract things like approval, it gives her time to explore all the feelings that overwhelm her, first while her parents are ill and then while they die, not to mention her grief in the days and months after they die. In that sense, this collection is one long obituary for both her parents and the familiar way of life she had grown accustomed to.

The form suits Chang’s talents well. It also challenges the reader to consider all the little “deaths” we experience each day, how they change us in big and small ways, and what we notice about them if we take a moment to think. People change, that’s well understood. But seen through this lens, we come to realize that change in life is nothing but a series of little deaths, some planned or expected, many more spontaneous and surprising. Like this book!