Tarfia Faizullah (Photo by Amanda Abel)

Tarfia Faizullah’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, New Ohio Review, Passages North, Poetry Daily, Crab Orchard Review, Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she received her MFA in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she served as the associate editor of Blackbird. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Bread Loaf Writers Conference Margaret Bridgman Scholarship, a Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Peter Taylor Fellowship, a Ploughshares Cohen Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and other honors. She lives in Washington, DC, where she helps edit the Asian American Literary Review and Trans-Portal.

For APIA Heritage Month 2012, we are revisiting our Process Profile series, in which contemporary Asian American poets discuss their craft, focusing on their process for a single poem from inception to publication. As in the past, we’ve asked several Lantern Review contributors to discuss their process for composing a poem of theirs that we’ve published. In this installment, Tarfia Faizullah reflects upon her poem “At Zahra’s Salon for Ladies,” which appeared in Issue 4.

* * *

1. It actually did begin at Zahra’s Salon, with my head tilted back.
2. Auntie Neelam and I never spoke, though she has always been gentle with me and I have never gone to another stylist.
3. That day at the salon, Ghulam Ali’s song Chupke, Chupke began to play.
4. It had been many, many summers since I had last heard that song.
5. My younger self rose up.
6. I went home and began to try to affix the atmosphere of the salon, the deft, elegant movements of Auntie Neelam’s fingers.
7. I listened to Chupke, Chupke over and over again.
8. I called my mother, cradled the phone against my shoulder to take notes while she translated Chupke, Chupke for me.
9. I began to remember that other, younger summer.
10. The summer I had started growing out of my swimsuit.
11. How bewildered I was, how frightened by all that dark hair shadowing across me.
12.  “I can feel that other day running underneath this one,” Anne Carson wrote, and similarly, I strongly felt the summer of my youth below that present one.
13.  As adults, we take for granted the agency we have to strip our bodies of their darkness.
14. The poem has always been in second person. It had to be so that I could clearly see both my younger and adult selves as I was addressing them.
15. “At Zahra’s Salon” took me two years to write.
16. I am interested in the possibilities of collage, of braiding together multiple elements.
17. I love David Shields’s assertion of collage as “a demonstration of the many becoming the one, with the one never fully resolved because of the many that continue to impinge on it.”
18. It took two years to try to weave together the salon, the song, and those other summers while ensuring each element remained singular and intact.
19. One day, I asked Auntie Neelam about her life.
20. She was born and raised in India, and is married and has a child.
21. I think she was as startled as I was.
22. She started telling me about her wedding day.
23. I remembered my own wedding, the way my body was purified, decorated, posed.
24. She gave me a mishti.
25. I left the salon, my face smarting.
26. One of the red brick walls was covered in clematis vine.
27. The sky was so blue.
28. I wanted to write a poem that could dwell in nostalgia, that could dwell in those first feelings of hunger without fully leaving the present.
29. I wanted to write a poem that acknowledged the beauty and terror of solitude.
30. Don’t we all long for a lifetime of sweetness?

Pocket Broadside #6 - Michelle Penaloza

A poem by dual Kartika Review and Lantern Review contributor Michelle Peñaloza is up on Pocket Broadsides today!  Click here to read “This Idea of Sin” on Tumblr.

To see all of the Pocket Broadsides that have been posted on Tumblr thus far, visit the project’s main page at pocketbroadsides.tumblr.com. To read each new piece as soon as it is posted, follow us on Tumblr, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Luisa A. Igloria

This May, in celebration of APIA Heritage Month, we have asked several respected teachers and writers of Asian American poetry to share writing exercises with us in lieu of our regular Friday Prompts. This week’s installment was contributed by Luisa A. Igloria.

Writing poetry is always a little archaeological—we dig and sift not only through our fund of experiences and memories, but also through a variety of textual fragments. As a writer in the diaspora, I am always reminded that the past, history, is a hallucinatory presence right here with us; that our life in the contemporary moment is marked by the displacements that time is eternally enacting.

In the news, we encounter stories about all sorts of anniversaries and commemorations: recently, so many articles on Bin Laden’s capture and killing last year; but also, I read the reminder that my high school friend and classmate, James Balao (whose 51st birthday was April 19), has been missing for nearly four years now since his political abduction by state forces on September 17, 2008. And then, I learn that a former student and friend, and one of my daughter’s grade school teachers who has made a life in Japan these last ten years, walked out of her home and marriage a month ago, with three very small children in tow—and has not been seen or heard of since. How is it possible? I am disturbed. I am disturbed by these unexplained rifts in time, by the unforgivable absences of explanations. And because facts alone, even when they are available, cannot assuage the terrible depths of these displacements, I turn to poetry for some kind of response, if not relief.

Because we are all involved in the drift of time, displacement is a function of contemporary experience—it is not something reserved only for us in the diaspora or for those of us who live with the legacies of colonization. History is a field at once very large and very intimate. But I like to think of the past as not completely done, of history’s archives as not static; we can enter the archive, we can reconstruct and re-imagine events, we can insert ourselves as figures or characters into its landscapes.

In my last book, Juan Luna’s Revolver, I used a perspective that let me travel into and out of specific Filipino histories (the world of Filipino intellectuals and artists abroad in 19th century Europe, the world of the 1904 World’s Fair and Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri); this perspective allowed me to establish a kind of specular relationship with history’s contexts and contents—I use the meaning of specular here as it relates to the medical instrument which allows entry into a body cavity, allowing for the possibility of more direct vision.

I used a similar method of composition in writing the poem below, which has been archived as part of my poem-a-day project (I’ve written at least a poem a day since November 20, 2010) at Via Negativa. I also loosely borrow the numbered structure of recorded “dreams” that Roberto Bolaño uses in his prose poem “A Stroll Through Literature” (from the book Tres).

In the poem, I am able to engage a variety of “facts” from Philippine colonial history and figures from colonial texts, including, but not limited to: the babaylanes (poet-priestesses and keepers of oral epic traditions) who were driven out of town when institutionalized religion was introduced; characters from Balagtas’ allegorical long poem “Florante at Laura” and from Jose Rizal’s incendiary novel, Noli Me Tangere; the earliest recorded indigenous Filipina poet, Leona Florentino.

Much like, I suppose, someone working with (but not limited to) collage, dream, hallucination, or a choose-your-own-adventure book, I can juxtapose fragments of different narratives, rearrange their timelines, push them toward different sets of questions, ask What if?, and arrive at any of a number of complex possibilities. None of them may be completely true, or completely false; but who is to say?

Hallucinatorio
Luisa A. Igloria
Posted at Via Negativa on March 25, 2012
(after Roberto Bolaño’s “A Stroll Through Literature”)

1. I dream of blood that wells from a cut, uncoils its wavelengths of sequestered light, turns more solid than the furniture in my house.

2. In my dream it is Lent, just like it is right now. Guardia civil are herding babaylanes into yellow Humvees. Their bandannas, knotted under the chin, catch the glow of sunset. The vehicles rev up and head toward the hills. When the dust settles, the townsfolk find they cannot erase the ancient writing that has formed beneath tire tracks. It becomes their new epic poem. They will read it every year. Movie producers will come to film it.

3. In my dream it is still Lent. Which can mean any of a number of things: penitents stripped to the waist, their heads wrapped in sack-cloth, their brows circled with crude vines or barbed wire. Their backs: red labyrinths, ladders gorged with flame.

4. In another dream all the lilies have open vestments. The children come to gather pollen in their cups. Every eyelid will be streaked with gold, every finger outlined with knowing.

5. I dream that in the ruined chapel, above carpets of moss, a cherub ziplines toward me from the belfry. When was the last time you washed your face? I ask my soul. It likes to play in the mud, where it is cool. It hangs its head to one side; it doesn’t like to brush its hair.

6. Donde? Aqui, aqui.

7. In this dream, I knock on the door of room after room until I come to the one where Prinsipe Florante is lashed to a tree, bemoaning his fate. If I turn the right combination of locks hidden in the leaves, we will understand each other perfectly, in monorhyming quatrains filled with lyric and metaphor. And the lion will slink back into the darkness from which it came.

8. In this dream I gently cover the woman’s mouth with my hand, lead her into a room which has temporarily been stripped of all reminders of her sons; I bathe her fevered brow with water. If you lived her story, you too would be crazed. Later in the night, the oil lamp that should have ignited the revolution the first time, will burn down the governor’s house.

9. In this dream it is many years since you have touched me. By this I mean the premises have fallen silent. Sometimes it is not a dream.

10. The poet leaves: she is outcast from her hometown. Does she drink? Chew betel nut leaf? Swear like a cargador at the pier? Gamble away her children’s inheritance? Smoke cigars with the lit end in her mouth? Take lovers, including her maid? Wear only pants? Burn her bra? You have no imagination if you think this is all it takes to be a poet.

* * *

Prompt: Reflect on a subject of historical relevance to you and write a poem in which you take several pieces of available or archival knowledge—in any textual form (documents, art work, photographs, songs, overheard language)—and re-imagine/re-cast their language, their outcome, their time and setting, their narrative trajectory. Involve yourself in the poem in some way: have a conversation, or an argument; become a participant in these reconstructed landscapes.

Luisa A. Igloria is a Professor of Creative Writing and English, and Director of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University. She is the author of Juan Luna’s Revolver (winner of the 2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), Trill & Mordent (WordTech Editions, 2005) and 8 other books. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, The Missouri Review, Indiana Review, Rattle, and TriQuarterly, and her various literary awards include the 2007 49th Parallel Poetry Prize (selected by Carolyne Wright for the Bellingham Review), the 2007 James Hearst Poetry Prize (selected by former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser for the North American Review); the 2006 National Writers Union Poetry Prize (selected by Adrienne Rich); and the 2006 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize (Crab Orchard Review). Luisa is also an eleven-time recipient of the Philippines’ highest literary prize—the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature—in three genres, and its Hall of Fame distinction.

Andre Yang | Photo by Mary Yang

Andre Yang is a Hmong American poet from Fresno, California. He is a founding member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle (HAWC), where he actively conducts and participates in public writing workshops. He completed the Creative Writing (Poetry) MFA program at California State University, Fresno, where he was a Philip Levine Scholar, recipient of the Academy of American Poets-sponsored Ernesto Trejo Prize, and the Graduate Dean’s Medalist of the College of Arts and Humanities.  Andre is a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellow, and has attended the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and recently completed an artist residency at the Ucross Foundation.  He co-edited How Do I Begin – A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Heyday, 2011), and his poetry has appeared in Paj Ntaub Voice, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and the chapbook anthology ‘Here is a Pen’ (Achiote Press).

For APIA Heritage Month 2012, we are revisiting our Process Profile series, in which contemporary Asian American poets discuss their craft, focusing on their process for a single poem from inception to publication. This year, we’ve asked several Lantern Review contributors to discuss their process for composing a poem that we’ve published. In this installment, Andre Yang discusses his poem “Why I Feel the Way I Do About SB 1070,” which appeared in Issue 3 of Lantern Review.

*  *  *

In a way, I have been writing this poem all my life, and considering all the things I discuss in the poem, it really does span my life.  The poem was written to express my feelings about the inception and implementation Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, though I also wanted it to capture my thoughts on the interconnectedness of humanity.

I might not have written “Why I Feel The Way I Do About SB 1070” had I not met Francisco Xavier Alarcón at his Ce Uno One book launch in Sacramento, California.   I overheard Francisco saying he was attending the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference later that year in Washington D.C. (2011), and since I too was planning to attend the conference, I used that as a conversation starter and approached him.  He mentioned that while in D.C., he would be organizing two off-site Floricanto readings based on his Facebook page, “Poets Responding to SB 1070,” and that well-established poets like Martín Espada would be taking part in the reading.  Five minutes into the conversation, he asked, to my complete surprise, if I wanted to participate in the readings. I said I’d be honored, and told him I’d contact him when I felt I had a poem worthy of the purpose.

Months passed and I hadn’t written a thing.  When a friend and poet, Anthony Cody, emailed me a CNN article link that discussed the saola, a rare “Asian unicorn,” an intrigue arose from me.  I’d never heard of the saola, but I did some research and learned that it lives only in undeveloped, remote regions of Southeast Asia, and avoids areas touched by humans, to the extent that no biologist has ever seen it in the wild.  The article mentioned that villagers in Laos once caught a saola and held it in captivity while awaiting the arrival of scientists, but that the animal died shortly after the scientists arrived.  There has never been a successful case of anyone keeping a saola alive in captivity.

Learning about this saola and its death reminded me of another article I’d read a few weeks earlier about an elderly (and sickly) Hmong man from Visalia, California, who filed a lawsuit under the pseudonym John Doe Xiong.  Because of his deteriorating health, Mr. Xiong wanted to return to Laos, where his wife and children still lived, to die amongst his loved ones and be buried in the land of his birth. Because his Laotian passport was taken from him by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency when he took refuge in the United States, however, he was unable to make that journey back.  I couldn’t help but relate his struggle with the captive saola, how their fates were determined by another’s decisions.  As a member of the first generation of Hmong people to be born in the United States, I’m always aware of my Hmongness.  How my people lived in the highest regions of the mountains of Laos in order to not be subject to the rules and laws of other lowland (and foothill) peoples.  How we’ve no place left on this planet to run to to avoid living amongst others.  How, considering all we’ve been through (the diaspora, the immersion into modern societies), so many of our elders are still so resistant to change.

Reading about the saola also triggered a memory of my meeting Sherman Alexie at AWP in Denver.  In a private conversation with Alexie, I mentioned that I was a Hmong American poet, to which he responded, “I know the Hmong.  The Hmong are the Native Americans of Asia.”  I somehow made it through the rest of the conversation without stumbling.  Afterwards I immediately called my wife (fiancé at the time) and, in a mix of tears and garbled words, expressed my surprise that Sherman Alexie, someone I didn’t expect to even know the Hmong existed, not only knew of us, but identified with us so closely.  To Alexie, our two peoples were metaphors for one another.  I considered this with the fact that many Chicanos/Latinos also have indigenous blood, and soon all these things converged, combined, and spilled onto the page as a poem.  I went on to workshop the poem at the Hmong American Writers’ Circle and in the Fresno State MFA Program, which helped me refine and reorder the material, but for the most part, it was my existence that guided the process.

Pocket Broadside #5 - Wendy Chin-Tanner

A micro-poem by Issue 3 contributor and current LR staff writer Wendy Chin-Tanner has been posted to the Pocket Broadsides Tumblr page.

Wendy is the driving force behind the host of  thoughtful, colorful interviews that we’ve had the opportunity to publish on the blog this year, and we are excited to have been able to include some of her own poetry in the Pocket Broadsides series.  Please help us to spread the word by tweeting, re-blogging, and sharing her micro-poem wherever you can.

To see all of the Pocket Broadsides that have been posted on Tumblr thus far, visit the project’s main page at pocketbroadsides.tumblr.com. To read each new piece as soon as it is posted, follow us on Tumblr, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Karen An-hwei Lee

This May, in celebration of APIA Heritage Month, we have asked several respected teachers and writers of Asian American poetry to share writing exercises with us in lieu of our regular Friday Prompts. This week’s installment was contributed by Karen An-hwei Lee.

In Santa Ana, where I live, a curious wind rises only in autumn and winter. It is a hot, dry wind. Hair static. Restless dogs lie in the shade; quiet dogs are restless. In the “Los Angeles Notebook,” Joan Didion writes of the Santa Ana wind: “The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called ‘earthquake weather.’”

The wind is not named for any geographic origins here. Miles away, it starts with a downsweep of cool air that is slowly heated while crossing the high Mojave Desert into our valleys and coastal regions. Unsettling our routines, it sweeps across my city of gardeners and mission arches. Angelenos who spent their childhoods south of the Great Basin, who recall urban fires and great earthquakes, call it the “Santana.”

When the Santa Ana comes, the sun looms closer to the earth despite the winter solstice. Noon hangs, a sharp, angular hour, in the sky. Eucalyptuses toss dry leaves onto the asphalt, and no one sweeps them: no use. No one picks up broken pottery shards. Let the wind sweep everything clean, “for the wind blows wherever it pleases,” says Jesus to Nicodemus. “You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). After prayer, I close the shades, stay in the coolest room away from the lanai.

What is the tone of this wind?

I think of lines from “To the Tune of Wuling Spring” by the Song Dynasty woman poet Li Qingzhao. She was highly attuned to her surroundings, whether in days of plenty or of war and exile: “When flowers vanish / and wind ceases late in the day, / I am too tired to brush my hair.” Or these lines from her poem, “To the Tune of Sands of a Silk-Washing Stream”: “A far-off mountain range thins the falling dusk; / . . . as ineluctable pear blossoms, withering, wilt to fade.”

It is a desert wind, not a hurricane gale or a blizzard. As a girl, spending my childhood on an archipelago and two New England coasts, I experienced both of the latter. With the Santa Ana wind, tar paper tumbles in the road. I set out dishes to dry; a teaspoon of water vanishes. Night yields little relief as sea waves swell to the west. To the east, helicopters fly over spot fires in the hills and canyons where rough chaparral brush—yucca, black sage, manzanita—has weathered pre-blackened zones of controlled burning.

After moving to California, I learned two things.

With an earthquake, temblor-raised dust seeds the clouds, sending rain. After the Santa Ana calms, a fog always rolls in. I still do not know whether this is a sea fog or a land fog. On the coast, we have a phenomenon called a marine layer, so perhaps that is what this is. The temperature drops from the nineties to the seventies and even to the forties after sundown. I walk in the fog with my hair unbound and a fresh skirt, carrying mailed books in the welcome cool. Following a week of fire and smoke, I am grateful for the fog as a divine provision.

Prompt: Consider the rhythm of a wind you know well and write in this rhythm.

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo 2012), Ardor (Tupelo 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004), which won the Norma Farber First Book Award. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she lives and teaches in southern California, where she is a novice harpist. She earned an M.F.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

Vikas K. Menon

Vikas K. Menon is a poet and playwright whose poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as burntdistrict, diode, and The Literary Review, among others.  His poetry manuscript godflesh was a finalist for the 2010 Kinereth Gensler Award and a semifinalist for the Beatrice Hawley award, both from Alice James Books.   His poetry has been featured in Indivisible:  An Anthology of South Asian American Poetry and is forthcoming in The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry by Indians.  He is a board member of Kundiman, the first organization of its kind dedicated to supporting Asian-American poetry and is the Resident Playwright of Ruffled Feathers Theater company. 

For APIA Heritage Month 2012, we are revisiting our Process Profile series, in which contemporary Asian American poets discuss their craft, focusing on their process for a single poem from inception to publication. This year, we’ve asked several Lantern Review contributors to discuss their process for composing a poem that we’ve published. In this installment, Vikas K. Menon discusses his poem “Othertongue,” which appeared in Issue 3 of Lantern Review.

*  *  *

My writing process is both fitful and fickle:  at the beginning of a writing session, I tend to move quickly among drafts to see which pieces pull me into further play.  This method has allowed me to elude the blocks that used to plague my writing life.  “Other Tongue” started in quick sketches; in this case, with a freewrite about my struggles with my parents’ ancestral tongue, Malayalam.  Malayalam is a Dravidian language that is outside of the Indo-European family of languages, and it is primarily spoken in the South Indian state of Kerala.  While I can comprehend Malayalam when it is spoken colloquially, I am otherwise illiterate in the language.  Since it was the language of intimacy used by my elders during my childhood, I am ashamed by my inability to speak it fluently.  But I can still revel in its aural pleasures and rolling cadences, its stark contrasts with English.  So I began writing into the texture of it, exploring the strangeness of its syllables in my mouth.  At the same time, I was working on a separate poem that explored my mother’s English, which is heavily inflected by Malayalam.  Finally, I realized that the two poems were linked by their exploration of the difficulties of articulation.  Despite that theme, paradoxically, the poem works quite well at readings: there is initial laughter at my mother’s malapropism that quickly turns to silent discomfort.  I like that sudden turn, something the poet and performer Regie Cabico does beautifully.

Process Profiles Series

Just as we’ve done in past Mays, we’ve asked several of our contributors to write short guest posts for us in which they reflect upon their processes for writing a poem of theirs that we’ve published.  This has always been one of our favorite series to run, and we hope that you’ll enjoy this year’s installments equally as much as those from years past.  A new Process Profile will be posted each week (usually on a Wednesday), every week, for the duration of May.

Curated Prompts

We had a lot of fun getting to work with our guest prompt-writers last May, so we’re thrilled to be able to continue our Curated Prompts series—in which we post writing exercises contributed by respected writers and teachers of Asian American poetry in lieu of our regular Friday Prompts—during this year’s APIA Heritage Month.  This year’s lineup begins with Karen An-hwei Lee, whose exuberant, weather-inspired exercise will appear on the blog this Friday, the 4th.

Issue 5 Reading Period to Open Mid-Month

We’ve been waiting to re-open our reading period, because we have a very special announcement to make about our next issue. All will be revealed in mid-May, when we will officially open our doors to submissions for Issue 5.

The Poetry Celebration Continues

We’re particularly lucky, in a sense, that Poetry Month and APIA Heritage Month are back to back, because it means that we have the opportunity to celebrate Asian American poetry for two months straight!  In addition to our May series, we will also be keeping April’s Digital Broadsides up on the blog, and will continue to post Pocket Broadsides on Tumblr. We hope that you’ll continue to share these projects far and wide as our celebration of Asian American poetry continues.

Many thanks, and a very happy May to you.

Iris & Mia

Birds of Paradise by Christine Kitano | Lynx House Press 2011 | $15.95

“Plain, gray, and though I didn’t / know Latin then, still could guess / what inornatus might mean,” writes Kitano in the closing poem of her collection, referring here to the baeolophus inornatus, or plain titmouse, that flies into her family’s kitchen and is promptly killed. She demands a funeral, identifying with the poor bird:

Plain gray Christine, also known as
the plain daughter, Filia inornata
of the Kitano family. Plain gray
above, paler gray below; crest gray.

The irony of the plain, filial bird emerges when placed in conversation with the title poem of the collection, “Birds of Paradise,” which refers not to birds but to a plantfrom South Africa that looks like the birds. The title also calls to my mind the “false birds of paradise” plant from the Hawaiian islands that looks like the South African plant. I mention all this in order to call attention to the layers of resemblance and recognition—crucial themes to this book of poems. In the title poem, our plain filia inornata cups the bird of paradise plant in her hand, pretending “to be an African queen, the stunning orange / bird my companion, or Sleeping Beauty, / the flower’s sharp stigma a poisoned spindle.” A child of Japanese and Korean immigrants, her marginality and desires push her to imagine a still greater and still more exotic paradise than the one to whichher family has arrived.

In these narrative memoir poems, the search for self is expressed in instances of the estranged and wondrous. Kitano’s project orbits around moments of mistaken recognition, as in the title poem, for instance, which ends with an image of the speaker’s father: “He swam with such power / I almost forgot who he was.” In “Form,” in which the night and morning of her father’s death are condensed into small moments, traces of him are sought after in his stereo set:

White noise hummed
out of the speakers, from which I tried
to recognize a voice. But no, and when
I drew the curtains open, the room filled
not with ash, but light.

This last line evokes misperception to clarify a perception, something we see often in Kitano’s poems. “After the Show” ends with a road that looks like a rope that looks like a river, while clematis blooms look like stars lining that road, which, “From where I stand . . . might be vanishing.” Another poem, “Insomniac’s Best Nightmare,” ends with the speaker waking from a dream during the day: “The sky is still black—not with night, / but crows.” And in “Finding the Family Tree,” the speaker’s schizophrenic brother “thinks [she’s] someone else,” the girls at school “pretend not to know [her],” and:

In the bathroom mirror, under the humming
fluorescent light, behind the face
of my dead sister, I am sad, again
to find myself.

Kitano uses metaphor to collapse identities and associations into one another. In “Bile,” for instance, the speaker’s mother accuses her of being the source of her unhappiness. The poem’s cinematic angle pans back and forth between the silent “I” and the mother who keeps accusing the “you.” Lines are enjambed on the command, “Look,” and the poem ends, finally, with a conflated identity in which three generations are invoked and the words spoken become incommunicable, nonlinear, supernatural:

My mother cries

for her mother, calls out,
her crooked words Korean,
and cryptic as a spell.

Many of the poems are memories of the poet’s father, and chronicle the end of those who are gone or lost. Other poems form a series on insomnia—that state of being half-awake and without a sense of time—and is perhaps telling of this poet’s writing process, as we see in this ending to “Cooking at Night:” “And I’ll spend every night / like this, writing to someone / who sleeps in another world.”

These are also poems in search of wholeness. Paradise is a ghost in these poems, and its imagining is a stupefied act of grasping and remembering. “Untwinned” reaches for a deceased twin, for whom the speaker invents a personality: “She likes the Greek myths, / the flame-breathing chimera / that swallows its own throat.” But this is just a mirror which the narrator keeps under her pillow. The poem ends: “When I can’t / sleep, I practice fitting my fist / into my mouth. It helps me / to feel whole.” These poems are a self-swallowing act, an effort to consume the past, and an impossible effort to close and fit into a full shape. They are poems of lingering and muted absences. “Luis’s Hands” reaches a momentary closeness between two restaurant employees, but ends with the remains of solitude:

That night,
when I undressed,
I found an amber bruise
on my thigh. I pressed
my dry fingers against it
and went to bed thinking
of Luis, the muted smell
of lemon still on my hand.

And these are poems of existing within narrow margins, even inside the household. Here are a few lines from “Drowning:”

I tried to disappear,
invisibility the best defense against
my mother’s anger. I pinned my hair
across my eyes like a fence,
pulled the drawstring
hood of my sweatshirt
tight against my throat.

Disappearance, a boundary, a noose. This poem ends with a dream “of drowning, face to face,” in which the wish to vanish is impossible. One is always seen, or seeing, even if plain and gray.

Birds of Paradise is an apt title for the collection, as paradise exists only in the imagination, always lost or out of reach, much in the same way as nostalgia. And birds of paradise are only resemblances, creatures or plants or people who seem to belong to this out-of-reach space. The poems thus leaveone feeling close and remote at the same time, estranged and yet familiar.

"Narrative" (Click to visit the download page)

This week’s Digital Broadside, which features Janine Joseph’s “Narrative” from LR Issue 4, was designed by Bethany Hana Fong, an SF-Bay-Area-based artist and designer whose black and white portraits of her grandfather appeared in Issue 2. We love the way that the quirky, collage-like nature of Bethany’s design echoes the fractured whimsy of the narrative tellings in Janine’s poem. We also like the effect that designing each version (printable and wallpaper) in a different orientation had on the possibilities for reading the poem itself.  While the print version preserves the original (vertical) arrangement of stanzas, the wallpaper version floats them side-by-side into a matrix-like grid, so that the stanzas can be read in juxtaposition, as well as linearly. Both versions of Bethany’s beautiful design can be downloaded over at our “Digital Broadsides” page.

We hope that you’ve enjoyed our Digital Broadside series this April. And as National Poetry Month draws to a close, we hope you’ll consider telling us about what you did with the broadsides that you downloaded. Did you hang a copy somewhere unusual? Did your new wallpaper or cubicle decoration lead to any interesting conversations?  Did having a poem on your desktop or physical wall inspire you in your own writing life in some way? We’d love to hear your stories— leave us a comment, post a note on our Facebook Wall, or Tweet us to share!