Joyce Peseroff on The Yellow Book, poems by Sam Cha
When the Japanese occupied Korea some eighty years ago, they outlawed spoken Korean and made Japanese the official language, a species of agony occupiers have imposed for eons on the occupied. Sam Cha uses this shard of history to examine the name of a woman who would become notorious in the U.S.: “‘Soon Ja’ is a Japanese name: Junko. It is a mark of conquest, a brand, a collar; it asks the bearer of the name to accept not only traditional women’s roles, but also obey & yield mildly to Japanese rule.”
Throughout The Yellow Book, Sam Cha is mistaken for Japanese, Chinese, Thai. He finds his own history smeared or negated or ignored. Born in Korea, Cha was sent to the U.S. as a toddler, returned when he was in elementary school while his mother pursued an advanced degree, then brought back to the U.S. Part prose and part verse, part essay and part memoir, this collection, like the author, refuses to be pigeonholed. “These long lines of mine, these lists, these clustering sounds, these polylinguamorous cicadences” he continues in “Koreans with Guns” — “they aren’t from Whitman or Joyce. I don’t write or think or dream in Korean anymore. But I make a Korean out of English every time I write.”
Cha interrogates various cultures — literary, national, racial, historical — both as participant and outsider. “Where’re you from?” demands a “shadowy person” in one of a series entitled “punchline;” “No but where are you really from.” Like the convert who knows his sect’s rules better than those born to the faith, an immigrant (or emigrant) can be quick to discern social and political truths snubbed by other citizens. Cha’s great gift is to frame these in personal terms.
The boy in “Why I Am Not a Pianist” has traveled into the future, flying from the U.S. to Korea on January 24 but finding it’s January 26 when he arrives. The future, he discovers, is punishing: “…the teachers carried around things they used to hit you. The men carried broom handles and sawed-off pool cues and duct-taped lengths of hockey sticks with LOVE HURTS and THIS ROD SPARES NO CHILD written in large friendly letters …” No longer fluent in Korean but able to understand his classmates’ taunts, Cha writes he “started talking with my fists.” He adds, “I was Caliban for years. No matter how good I got at school, at taking tests — and I got very good very fast—I was never fully human there.” Back in the U.S., Cha finds “LOVE HURTS here, too.// I’d hit / that, you say. I’d hit it. Hit me up. Are you … hitting / on me?” Cha frames his piece on the confluences of succor and pain with an anecdote about unwittingly arousing a pet Chihuahua. The dog bares its most vulnerable part “like a dark red lipstick” and “… for once I am not thinking about LOVE HURTS// puzzled I am thinking about the chihuahua, // what and why it likes how it is not afraid of hurt —”.
Much of The Yellow Book apprises a complex of pasts; poems about the pandemic bring history into an electric present. In “COVID days 3,” Cha writes how “college-educated” whites had “discovered a continent/where anything could kill them. // A doorknob. An unwashed counter. / A baby blanket. Other people. Other / white people. How wild. / Like some new planet — // And we, we who were born here: /we welcomed them home.” It’s notable that this poem, and other “COVID days,” appear as footnotes to several of the “punchline” series. Cha’s footnotes, integral to the book, are more Junot Diaz than T.S. Eliot; they add a new dimension to texts they hang from. Providing literary, philosophical and historical context, they are not so much digressions as wormholes to a parallel universe.
And Du Soon-ja? In 1991 she shot Latasha Harlins, a young black woman she accused of shoplifting, after she grabbed her and Latasha hit back. Cha indicts the ways racism twists the lives of those neither black nor white nor born in the USA: Soon-ja “thought of Latasha not as Latasha, but as that black girl … Soon-ja saw what she was prepared to see” through a “toxic sludge of East Asian xenophobia and American racism, compounded by generations of trauma from colonialism and war and oppression.” Du Soon-ja is one of a cast of characters — Mr. Miyagi, Jack London, a fictionalized version of Civil War general Franz Sigel — who spin, through Cha’s imagination, a through-line for his book.
The Yellow Book notes the fragility of words even as it highlights language’s ability to abuse and disempower. In “some notes about where I’m from, framed as a discussion of genre,” Cha writes, “The lyric is about being a dying thing, about being something, a thinking feeling / human mind, that is always just about to become nothing. // The lyric is about being. / And being is precisely what can’t be said.” “Becoming” remains at the core of writing and being human: “When we write, when we love, we are immigrants; we are migrating, we are caravans.” Evolving from history, doubt, evasion, memory, and utterance, Sam Cha’s The Yellow Book is a brilliant caravan well worth joining.
[Published by Pank Books on November 5, 2020, 114 pages, $18.00 paperback]
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David Roderick on The Tilt Torn away from the Seasons, poems by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers
A few weeks ago NASA successfully landed its Perseverance rover on Mars, unscathed and ready to explore. The mission’s objectives include studying the planet’s geology and hunting for signs of water. Which begs the question: does anyone doubt that we’ll be sending humans there soon? If we can keep humanity humming on this pale blue dot of a planet—if we can survive the new weather systems we’ve created, the water we’ve fouled, and the landscape we’ve mismanaged — won’t we launch an expedition to the Red Planet by the end of this century?
In The Tilt Torn away from the Seasons Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers imagines that expedition for us. Her visionary leaps are as bold as NASA’s though the impact of an interplanetary trip on the human spirit is her central occupation. In her poems wonder is in tension with alienation, excitement with loss and grief. Rogers demands that we explore how a human expedition to Mars is likely to play out. Wisely she turns to the histories of imperialism and colonialism as she speculates on our future interplanetary travels. In the book’s first poem, “The Frontier,” Rogers situates Mars as a territory ripe for exploitation, and she does so by characterizing it as a cinematized version of the American West:
Imagine a Western
set, a terrain of glare and scour.
The unspoken agoraphobia
drives us all
into the saloon:
the sheriff, the unshaved rogue, the virgin
in blue gingham, the Indian,
and the hourglass whore.
The idea that space is “the final frontier” isn’t new. What makes The Tilt Torn away from the Seasons so compelling is how richly it expresses human desire from various perspectives and in novel forms. In a Hollywood western, the characters play to type. Rogers’s poems, on the other hand, showcase a multitude of disembodied voices singing about their alienation, excitement, grief, pain, and joy. We don’t see them in costume, but we hear them calling from inside the fantastical context in which Rogers has cast them. “As I land, I weigh next to / nothing,” says the speaker of “The Frontier.” “I leap / three times as high. But there is no canopy, // no timber for an ax.” Those lines compress excitement and grief. And the surprising images of the timber and ax subtly remind us that Earth’s resources were lost because of untrammeled human desire.
There’s a lot of formal daring in this book, as if Rogers’s ambitious concept demands new forms. The first passage I cited in this review (from “The Frontier”) doesn’t exactly replicate Rogers’s because it would put this magazine’s digital layout editor in a fit. “The Frontier” is written in tercets in which the first line of each stanza begins on the far right of the page, the second slides leftward toward the middle of the page, and the third reaches back further still to the left. The next stanza begins on the right side of the page again and also cascades horizontally to the left. This formal feature strains the reader’s eye by forcing it to scan back and forth quickly over the lines, perhaps like the surveying eye of a robot or rover. In “Red Planet Application” Rogers presents us with an imagined survey for those humans applying for a Martian expedition, including questions such as: “Would you be willing to participate in a strenuous seven-year training program?” and “Have you ever been hospitalized for a psychological condition?” All of the answers to these questions arrive in lyrical couplets. “You will never see your family or friends again. Discuss,” yields the lyrical, “The brush of another person / is more gravity than I can stand. // Like a lantern’s metal and paper / if you touch me, I may collapse.” Having nothing to lose, the character responding to this peculiar questionnaire sounds primed for adventure. Curiously, the creator of the survey (a company? a government agency?) is never identified by name. With regard to the individuals speaking to us in these poems, cultural identity, so popular in contemporary poetry, never drifts to the foreground. This lends an eerie universality to Rogers’s voices that requires us to meditate on human desire on a scale beyond Earth’s. It’s as if she’s discovered a new category of existential bewilderment.
One long sequence that anchors the book, “Ecopoiesis,” plunges into dramatic despair, opening, “They said we could bring nothing with us. / That we would fashion a new / world from the lichens up.” The members of the expedition start building their new civilization underground, replete with “subdivided homes / carved along ancient / ruts, the lava tubes.” Another section ends, “We call this life // in the manhole. / But what is runoff? / What is a man?” To the speaker of this passage, Earth remains Edenic despite the fact that it has been destroyed and left behind. And on the new planet it’s impossible to escape the irony that we humans haven’t learned the lessons of history. Almost immediately after landing on Mars, the expedition drifts toward exploitation. “This time we’ll form more carefully …” says the speaker, while Rogers offers an ironic wink. “And if the place is / both barren and virgin, there’s no such thing / as an invasive species.”
In the book’s final poem, “Agnus Dei: Mars,” Rogers writes, “Our drifting they say, is genetic / in nature, a destiny hardwired / in our cells or the stars.” The mythic voice presented here projects a sense of hope. But after examining what we’ve done to our native home (Earth) and what we’ll likely do to our second home (Mars), it’s hard to feel optimistic about our future. In The Tilt Torn away from the Seasons, Rogers burrows into the DNA of our species, determined to show that our inherent flaws cause us to fail as much as we triumph. NASA estimates they’ll send the first humans to Mars in 2040. Rogers is already asking the question: “What could possibly go wrong?”
[Published by Acre Books on March 1, 2020, 86 pages, $16.00 paperback]
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David Blair on Spinster For Hire, poems by Julia Story
Since her first book, Post Moxie, is really an underground classic, a 3-D movie of a book, news of a new Julia Story book is big news for me. Who could forget that pared-down, teenaged world of ugly camouflage pants and invasive bamboo, her dubious mysticism, the formal innovation of her text-box prose-poetry shorts, or how she resisted the hostility of Indiana towards girls? Spinster for Hire is her second full-length collection, a sort of sequel that shows her originality and extends her range into deeper wit and shadows, childhood and being adult.
Formally, Spinster for Hire rises to the Post Moxie goad to do something new, especially with a number of three-part narrative poems that offer scenes from distinctly different, but thematically linked narrative moments. These miniaturizing narrative odes can go metaphysical, as we see in the third part of “Indiana Problems (Three Dusks).”
I was scared
that Jesus might
come out of
a cave to make
peace with me,
a gentle stroll
through the sleep-
shaped universe,
the fraction-shaped
universe.
Or loneliness can be experienced in the most creaturely way, as it is an anti-social and abject relief at the end of “Indiana Problem (Three Steaks).”
I left the charred
fat in a little
wall, left
the camper
and walked into
the firefly-packed
dark green dark and
no one looked
for me.
Typically, these Indiana childhood poems of solitude encase outlaw emotions that Story keeps close, evading the clichés of trauma by showing how occasional pleasures, like steaks, and pervasive pains blend together in her own and by extension, I think, every other person’s whole but troubled personality.
Here are some things to know about the poet in Spinster for Hire, where some of the mysterious details of the earlier book’s past and future are answered. She is writing about, among other things, the psychology and sociology of Indiana divorce, her battle with what sounds like some sort of mainstream version of an abusive but thrilling religious cult, bad sitcoms, and her own imaginative resistance. “Once I wrote an essay about the word ‘shade,'” she lets drop, “maybe in the context of some Blake poems I can’t remember.” Pain here is the past come back to possess the person, almost like a demonic possession. The poem ends, “Sometimes my head is in the fire but my eyes are here with me flickering, the same as always but open.” In “Of Use,” Story combines satire and tenderness as she evokes her life with her dogs in an underground-man basement apartment:
I was at worm level. As a woman, I am
closer to being an animal than a man is.
The dog moved over in the bed so I could
get back in. Closer to animals, I am more
prone to Satan. I am more easily seduced
by the things that cast shadows. It’s how
you know I’m not dead. A long time ago,
and maybe even now, the gods did horrible
things because they could …
The effect of Story’s midwestern plainness, brought to bear on the propensity of her childhood religion towards demonization and cruelty, makes for very unsettling comedy. The tolerance for the awful that makes these statements so funny comes from the very religious experience that it satirizes. Here is the opening of her prose poem “The New Trinity”: “The computer asks if I’m sure that I want to open a demon. Maybe?” Horror movies, she could not even watch all the years that she believed in demonic possession, but how does she feel now?
There is a sort-of famous poem in Spinster for Hire, and it shows her Blakean sense of punishing religions leading to cultures of abuse and violence, and also how these happen and are prolonged through cultural ephemera that form all the things we can read. Her Pushcart-winning prose poem, “Picture of a River,” describes a poster showing judgment day from her Sunday school classroom, and it makes us see a Jesus who is a “combination of mean and sorry,” and part of her project seems to be exposing the roots of the actual meanness and stupidity of religiously rightwing people. In the book, Story juxtaposes the poem with one called “Straw Dogs” that evokes Sam Peckinpah, but also, wildly, for a Boston poet, the filming of a movie about the Boston Marathon Bombing in Boston, zealotry here. Even if she says that she thinks “romantic” really means “damp,” red stained-glass windows make her see things as a child in an angry way, having to play Bach on the organ at church, forced to get things right. Oh she’s a romantic alright, several kinds of romantic, a dark one, a satirical one who treats style as a means of perception, an absurdist one. Her grand vision or flight into “spots of time” occurs as she is pursued on her bicycle by a seemingly viscous and possibly rabid pug through a neighborhood of subdivisions, but time is short because she is late for dinner, in trouble for that.
Some of the best poems in Spinster for Hire are set in England. A short poem about badger holes, open fields, bells and loneliness has the magic of short poems by Larkin. In “Today’s Alchemy,” she imagines herself as if she had been a British teenager, one that suffers a similar culture of video mediocrity, a world where we have to impose both meanness and love from our hearts. Here is some of this poem’s free, edgy movement.
On top of Pops from 1980,
Phil Collins in his Hawaiian shirt
dances awkwardly, lip synching,
his bald spot flashing pink and blue.
The couch I just bought is already
wearing out and gray dust covers
everything, even the sky and distant
tangle of trees. Out the window I watch
a new lamb unfold onto bent legs.
I feel a pully in my chest whenever
I look at her movement, crumpled
and blind, automatic. Her pupils
are rectangular like the pupils
of all prey. I could hunt her if
I wanted to. But my natural instinct
is a long Formica counter with a row
of harmless ladies stalking their feelings.
While part of her might want to hunt the teenagers dancing around the stage in the poem’s ending, Julia Story finds another Indiana wherever she goes. Note the British slang, pully, a pullover sweater, but we also hear George Herbert’s metaphysical “pulley.” It’s a shock to realize this is not a poem of ironic nostalgia, but one that weighs and judges her own sense of resentment against her equally strong sense of sympathy, which I guess is the whole point of imagining other people, the conflicts with ourselves. “Your desire for happiness,” Toni Morrison tells the students at an expensive graduation, “bores me.” Instead, we should try to dream in very precise sequences. Sounds like a poet talking to herself.
The persona in a Julia Story poem is an important figure, as her poems also work against performative certainties and unconsciously authority-mad energies that everywhere around us bounce. She is as self-vexing and as much of a product of her environment as characters in great novels, albeit a bit clumsier with her neighbor’s ceramic poodles, with a chronic pain condition, contemporary. When the speaker trips and falls down some basement steps or in a driveway and ends up a gory child, and describing the bones in her hands in a way that makes your own hands throb, agony — there are doctors who are specialists, and we don’t even want to know that their fields exist, nor the nerves they treat — or when she gets the name of the famous author of a book she is going on about wrong — Forster, not Lawrence, wrote Maurice — even while triumphantly raving about the classy and “period costume” movie version with unabashed and uncharacteristic enthusiasm that makes us look for the painful pratfall that we will come to expect here, when the poet considers the sad spectacle of steak or squirrels having a mass orgy, the perversely taciturn and abject moments here are important and register different levels on “the pain scale” used to measure the chronic pain that she evokes in the book’s opening poem, as if such pain could be measured at all, and as if hurt and all its awful phantom scripts were pure.
[Published by The Word Works on June 1, 2020, 76 pages, $18.00 paperback]