{"id":3938,"date":"2011-06-15T16:09:10","date_gmt":"2011-06-15T20:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=3938"},"modified":"2011-06-15T16:09:10","modified_gmt":"2011-06-15T20:09:10","slug":"review-aalr-vol-2-issue-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2011\/06\/15\/review-aalr-vol-2-issue-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: AALR, VOL. 2, ISSUE 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Asian American Literary Review<\/a> | Volume 2, Issue 1 | Winter\/Spring 2011<\/em><\/p>\n

In Gerald Maa\u2019s interview with Arthur Sze in this issue of the Asian American Literary Review<\/em>, Maa quotes from Auden: \u201cMany things can be said against anthologies, but for an adolescent to whom even the names of most of the poets are unknown, a good [anthology] can be an invaluable instructor.\u201d The same can be said of this 300-page journal, with its wide range of material including: a forum discussion with some of the editors about the “check all that apply” race option on the 2010\u00a0Census, an enclosed DVD of Kip Fulbeck\u2019s video short Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids<\/em>, and a complete bibliography of Carlos Bulosan provided by the Library of Congress’s\u00a0Asian American Pacific Islander Collection. This is all in addition to fiction, memoir, poetry, interviews with Arthur Sze (on editing Chinese Writers on Writing<\/em>) and Chang-rae Lee (on his most recent novel, The Surrendered<\/em>), book reviews, documentary photography, and a short graphic piece.<\/p>\n

This issue\u2019s theme is \u201cCounting Citizens\u201d and begins with a discussion about the question of multiracial self-representation on the Census. Jeffrey Yang takes a stance against the very structures of any representation and rejects claims for a \u2018post-racial\u2019 present: \u201cnot representation but transmutation, alchemy. . . . Representation is the impossible ideal of our democracy, where influence rules.\u201d Srikanth Reddy uses the development of Walt Whitman\u2019s poetry as a model, charting his expansive ownership of multitudes to his subjective position as an individual: \u201cThis progression\u2014from the poet as a vatic representative of everybody to the poet as a specimen capable only of registering her own experience\u2014might in some ways be a natural progression, from the exuberance of youth to the epistemological modesty of old age.\u201d He suggests an alternative perspective: that of the Other. Yang riffs on this and together they broach the aesthetic of language arts and \u201cthe problem of form\u2014the \u2018logic and order\u2019 of an artwork\u201d which seems to find friction between the canon and the margin. A different take on Bloom\u2019s \u201canxiety of influence,\u201d perhaps, in which the artist is in constant tension between the codified mastery of forebears and the yet unnamed mystery of the present\/future individual. Linguistic and cultural transplantation complicate loyalties, heritage, assumptions about audience, and <\/span>formal considerations. Reddy writes:<\/p>\n

To write a haiku or a ghazal in English does not bring us any closer to shifting the grounds of literary representation. In Yang\u2019s memorable formulation, such a literary gesture would fail to \u201creposition the frame structure.\u201d Rather, our formal labor [as Asian American writers] has to occur beyond the frame, in the abstract conceptual space where form is given particular shapes suited to the particular historical moment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Other prose in this issue gives us pause for further consideration. Joy Kogawa\u2019s excerpt from Gently to Nagasaki<\/em> puts the author in conversation with Marjorie Chan, both of them struggling with the atavism of the Rape of Nanking, now generations past: how are they to situate themselves as individuals and\u00a0as Japanese and Chinese Americans, both in relation\u00a0to one another and to their respective histories? Kip Fulbeck\u2019s short essay, \u201cFishing for Identity,\u201d invites attention to, first, the absurdities of race (\u201ceveryone is African\u201d) and, second, the complexity of race as an unavoidable layer of interface; he makes a point about proactive identity and distinguishes between \u201ccognizant as opposed to aware<\/em>.\u201d Eric Gamalinda\u2019s fiction short, \u201cFamous Literary Frauds,\u201d doesn\u2019t touch on race at all, instead examining authenticity and the celebrity-dom of authors, the public face divorced from the art object. And Arthur Sze, in his interview promoting\u00a0Chinese Writers on Writing<\/em>, reminds us that the importation of Chinese literature has, since Pound, remained a new business; the number of first-time English translations in the anthology demonstrate how under-represented contemporary Chinese writers are in the Anglophone world.<\/p>\n

The poems in this issue span a wonderful thematic and aesthetic range as indicated by the table of contents, which groups poems as sets from distinct poets rather than as individual pieces. The poems begin with Ray Hsu\u2019s subversive political pieces, the first of which is titled \u201cDear Sir or Madam:\u201d and demonstrates the dizzying effect of formal rhetoric. The content of the poem\u2019s \u201cletter\u201d says very little, using acronyms, pronouns, and vague phrases such as, \u201cto face key policy challenges\u201d or, \u201cWe presented \/ sufficient dignity and overwhelming feeling” without indicating to whom. The lineation only starts to break apart with self-awareness when the collective speaker says, \u201cwe are good for the facts.\u201d Hsu\u2019s other poems also appropriate official language, as can be seen from the title \u201cRights Mix #26,<\/span>\u201d which responds to each point of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article #26. The two pieces entitled \u201cSources\u201d are found poems consisting entirely of quotations ranging from Pat Robertson to Oscar Wilde. Through its syntax, \u201cHaiti (an earthquake)\u201d simulates rubble and mess, throwing sentences into a chaotic babble overloaded with articles and prepositions. Even so, impressions of the scene are left in the way that news tickers might bombard us with buzzwords: \u201cus tragic so assistance, people, said, Suffering, confront that economy in on they the own the region.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kimiko Hahn\u2019s series,\u00a0Haibun from the Summer (2009)<\/em> immediately follows Hsu\u2019s and, in stark contrast,<\/span> is apolitical. (She sequesters politics into its own aesthetic locus, as she said in an interview at ASU in October 2009: \u201cI don\u2019t look at poems that have political content as being any different from love poems or anything else. For me it\u2019s another topic.\u201d) As always with Hahn\u2019s poetry, these haibun<\/em> are unadorned, frank, and reveal the process of her work. Her distinctive use of italics shows us the caesura of her thought, the moments where her mind abides in the oddities or emphases of language: \u201cThe things mother did that I copied. The things they may recall as well. To make sure I could distinguish their socks. Distinguished socks<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aimee Nezhukumatathil\u2019s poems are shaped by tropes of love and motherhood, especially as they express themselves in a fairytale mode. The fairytale quality of \u201cDangerous\u201d (which begins, \u201cThe rooster talks to the donkey. \/ The turtle whispers to the rabbit. \/ The mouse conspires with the lion\u201d) overlaps into \u201cI Could be a Whale Shark,\u201d in which the speaker\u2019s imagination and anxieties at the beach undulate with the waves and sealife beneath the surface. In a short few lines, the pregnant speaker imagines herself \u201ca moon jelly,\u201d \u201ca whale shark,\u201d \u201ca flutefish,\u201d and the husband is her \u201csweet cuttlefish,\u201d the closeness of whom recalls her mind back to familiarity with her human body. \u201cDear Betty Brown\u201d is a poem of racial protest responding to the Texas Representative\u2019s suggestion that a foreign name of \u201ca rather difficult language\u201d be changed to a simpler one \u201cthat we could deal with more readily here.\u201d Nezhukumatathil equates a generic name-change to \u201cdraw[ing] a big fat X across my brown face.\u201d She defends her legitimacy as an American citizen with wonderful images that unravel from indignation to love and back to indignation:<\/p>\n

It would mean jamming my hand into a bucket
\nof mulberries with my Kansan husband
\nto signal summer & the slow scrape
\nof leaves across our lawn to signal fall.
\nIt means my mother & father gave
\nme their names from the coconut shores
\nof their countries & made a girl
\nwho grew up listening to Elvis while
\nshe did her homework & now writes
\npoems about people who should know better
\nto question what is easy & what is difficult . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Prageeta Sharma\u2019s dense poem, \u201cNeutrality Maki,\u201d examines Japanese maki as a site of objectification and boundaries. The maki\u2019s aim is neutrality \u201csince it will not apologize \/ for its doublethink nor its sheen\u201d although, in the maki, we glimpse the potential of a \u201cprinciple maki\u201d (\u201cthere is a sheer desire for certain principles not to exist\u201d) and a \u201csmall Geneva maki\u201d as well. The speaker asks, \u201cWhere is the neutrality in fueled splits? \/ Where the discourse is false, and the people falser still?\u201d perhaps referring to Sianne Nga’s epigraph on glamorous objects and viewers\u2019 willfully imposed \u201ccutification.\u201d The maki<\/em> is a complex image for an ambivalently inward- and outward-looking identity aware of its layers and which, as yet, \u201chasn\u2019t formed a face; it has fish for its brain \/ and the surface, only the surface, is intended for a forthright simper.\u201d A more lucid poem, \u201cThe Other Profiled in Cerulean,\u201d attempts frank explanation of the poet\u2019s intentions but keeps hitting questions instead: \u201cI\u2019m putting pressure on myself to write myself into the narrative, \/ the word \u2018myself,\u2019 what do I mean?\u201d In a surprising sequence of end-stopped lines, she writes:<\/p>\n

Perhaps
\nthe claim of words as objects is a kind of ownership of feeling.
\nThis is what frightens me. I do it too.
\nBut I don\u2019t feel like it\u2019s always authentic.
\nBut ownership is interesting\u2014
\nI have read how mimicry is ironic compromise,
\ncan the poem dismantle this?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ching-In Chen\u2019s poems, in keeping with the issue\u2019s theme of \u201cCounting Citizens,\u201d follow what may be a mythical Shiny City, which in her history is one among many \u201cassembled atop courtyards of bone.\u201d The poems begin with a bookburning, though its images recall water\u2014buckets, steam, waste\u2014instead of fire. The bookburning suggests the burning of myth, history, culture: \u201canthems to side-swipe and heroes to depose of.\u201d These are poems of vivid,<\/span> though unexplained,<\/span> loss and destruction, of \u201ca body that would not be \/ broken apart \/ again,\u201d of a \u201cbook of moths, \/ offstage light, the footstep of a wise \/ girl with no hair to call her \/ own.\u201d Of \u201cmy history being stewed without me\u201d and a house that \u201cpeels itself \/ in half, then is no more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pimone Triplett\u2019s The Hungry Ghosts<\/em> is a series of persona poems spoken by the \u201chungry ghosts\u201d of Buddhist tradition, starving in a limbo on earth: a metaphysical restaurant \u201c[n]estled between the Sit N Spin Laundry and Frenchy\u2019s Adult Book Store.\u201d As explained in the author\u2019s note, in these poems Triplett has fashioned her own pidgin \u201cthat\u2019s been mildly tempered into the Thai and Pali poetic forms called kaap yanii <\/em>and kaap chabang<\/em>\u201d which allows her to code-shift through proper and ungrammatical expression, often in service of cadence. We end up with lucid and musical phrases such as: \u201cSometimes I hear scream and suckle birthing up \/ far edge this wall of luck.\u201d These monologues are striking as the speakers\u2019 eternal inertness, their \u201cmany \/ \/ gristled millenia to get through,\u201d illuminates the myopic disappointments and disillusionment of our own lives: after all, \u201cthey\u2019re just simple spirit folk trying to find their way to the next level\u201d and they wash up on \u201cthese hard-but-haven shores you call yours.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other great poems and poets make up this volume, including the Mexican\/Spanish influences of Rick Barot\u2019s \u201cOaxaca Elegy\u201d and Michelle Har Kim\u2019s fine translations (the pages are side-by-side bilingual) of work by Japanese Peruvian poet Jose Watanabe. Adrienne Su\u2019s modern rhymes and Jeffrey Yang\u2019s short lyric fragments are also worth the read. This issue of the AALR<\/em> is a fine book of aesthetic range and topical treatment sure to stimulate and inspire insight. I consider myself sold as a future subscriber.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Asian American Literary Review | Volume 2, Issue 1 | Winter\/Spring 2011 In Gerald Maa\u2019s interview with Arthur Sze in this issue of the Asian American Literary Review, Maa quotes from Auden: \u201cMany things can be said against anthologies, but for an adolescent to whom even the names of most of the poets are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[390],"tags":[499,214,646,648,23,651,645,38,655,650,417,647,654,58,653,652,57,649],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3938"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3938"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4016,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3938\/revisions\/4016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}