Customer Reviews

The History of Anonymity (The VQR Poetry Series)

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I'm partway through HYPHEN magazine's recommended list of Asian American poetry books, and I found many books on the list not to my liking or merely adequate (Perhaps my own poetry would qualify for the dislike of others, but you'll have to be the judge of that. I'm in Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry, a really amazing anthology, and my own modest book just came out, a fox peeks out: poems.)

That is to say, I'd been disappointed by many books that have won awards and gained national and even international prominence. My friend suggested that I stop reading award winning poetry books, and read Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet and Alice Fulton's One Continuous Mistake : Four Noble Truths for Writers and Feeling as a Foreign Language and Bayles' Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, as well as write a poem a day. That I will do, but first I have to get through this darn list.

HYPHEN's book editors write of this book, Chang's "poems hinge on the edges of psychological devastation and renewal. Defying straightforward narrative in favor of sprawling, associative impressions, Chang employs abundant natural imagery to explore the dark side of relationships, memory and loss."

I was very pleased and taken with Chang's book. I felt moved by her thoughts, and connected to the losses and difficulties she touches on. She has a comfortable command of technical precision, and I wasn't disappointed in the least by her choices, in fact, just the opposite. There was a lot to hold my attention in her wordings and evocations. There is no hyperdramatic trilling here, only a searching and knowing. I liked the entire experience of this debut volume, and especially the last two poems, "I am in Unction now", and "Can something broken be so beautiful?"

From the first:

"All my life I have known

Mother stood beside a hole.

Some people carry shadows,

bad weather, but she nursed

an emptiness none of us could fill.

She liked the pain of space

and would not let Father walk with her..."

"What else have I lost? If I write a list,

I will lost the thing, the desire

for retrieval. So I tell myself. Unction

is a town of glass, not an escape.

I am tired of the past.

I am so tired."

And the last poems ends thus:

"I raise my arms

into the air. I would like to reach for something."

This is fine quality work. I look forward to reading more from Jennifer Chang.