{"id":7924,"date":"2019-03-26T09:00:49","date_gmt":"2019-03-26T16:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=7924"},"modified":"2019-03-26T09:58:24","modified_gmt":"2019-03-26T16:58:24","slug":"three-spring-apa-poetry-collections-that-reconstruct-kinship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2019\/03\/26\/three-spring-apa-poetry-collections-that-reconstruct-kinship\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Spring APA Poetry Collections That Reconstruct Kinship"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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L to R: THE YEAR OF BLUE WATER by Yanyi, MITOCHONDRIAL NIGHT by Ed Bok Lee, ANYONE WILL TELL YOU by Wendy Chin-Tanner<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This month\u2019s poetry round-up features three collections that consider and reconstruct restrictive notions of family, kinship, and relationships. Whether through essayistic reflection, dialogue, or lullaby, the poems from these new works scrutinize the power structures that normalize destructive ways of relating to one another while holding dear the people who can see us with clarity and compassion. We hope these books shed light on the people in your lives who enable transformation, as well as on the poetic techniques that can bear witness to intimacy. <\/em>
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The Year of Blue Water<\/em><\/strong><\/a> by Yanyi (Yale University Press, 2019)<\/strong>
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\u201cI thought that having myself was not supposed to take any effort\u201d (31), writes Yanyi in one passage of The Year of Blue Water<\/em>. Like many of the passages in the collection, this paragraph is arranged in the center of a page, as though the speaker himself stands in the middle of a hushed room, addressing his listener candidly. This tender dialogue is essential to the speaker\u2019s transformation throughout the collection. \u201cI have no control of my family,\u201d the speaker writes. \u201cThey may leave me; I accept that.\u201d What continues despite of (or rather, because of) the pain and violence of rejection is the project of reconstructing self and identity\u2014possible only because of the constellation of chosen kin in literature and life who can, and will, listen and respond to the speaker.
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The difficult transformation at the heart of Year of Blue Water <\/em>honors bell hooks\u2019s redefinition of love\u2014as \u201can action rather than a feeling\u201d\u2014in order to emphasize, assume, and honor the accountability and responsibility required of love. For this reason, there is an enchanting affinity between The Year of Blue Water<\/em> and Ross Gay\u2019s The Book of Delights<\/em>. Just as Gay commits himself each day to finding a \u201cnew delight\u201d to discover, exercising his \u201cdelight muscles,\u201d Yanyi commits himself to a type of love that recognizes the intentional activity and labor necessary for loving. Love as feeling, as bell hooks has written, has often been \u201cthe stuff of fantasy\u201d; if being queer, trans, and Asian only heightens the incongruity of fantasy and reality, then the action of love must always depend on the act of seeing self and other clearly. The concision of Yanyi\u2019s craft paradoxically speaks to how clarity is a process rather than a state to be achieved\u2014each terse sentence builds on the one before, layering meaning upon meaning. \u201cI am worth the work of transformations,\u201d Yanyi writes. \u201cAs in, I do not fear how I will emerge from myself, or how many times\u201d (57).
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Mitochondrial Night<\/em><\/strong><\/a> by Ed Bok Lee (Coffee House Press, 2019)<\/strong>
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It seems pass\u00e9 to place Ed Bok Lee\u2019s recent collection within the lineage of travel writing, a genre that by now has been exposed and condemned for its often imperialist and colonialist ambitions. But the literary history of travel writing is also full of spectacular and critical turns, thanks to work by Monique Truong, Bani Amor, and Karen Tei Yamashita, among others, that confronts<\/a> the legacies of empire, decolonizes<\/a> tourism, and repurposes the genre to gather<\/a> up communities forcibly split and scattered.
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Mitochondrial Night<\/em> is a dazzling continuation of this project. In \u201cMetaphormosis,\u201d for instance, the speaker\u2019s mother describes traditional harvesting techniques \u201cnot of Korea, or Corea, or North Korea, but Chosun\u201d (5); like the shifts in names and borders for Myanmar or Czechia, this story becomes a journey through kingdoms and imperial transitions that \u201cforced a hiccup in my mother\u2019s recollection\u201d (5). Everyday details, as well as familial lineage, serve as carriages for travel\u2014an \u201caluminum soda can\u201d (57), \u201cA distant Amtrak\u201d (60), \u201cyour thumbnail\u201d (81) are all opportunities to reflect on interconnectedness through sustainable exploration. We need not<\/g> rely on gas-guzzling jets and or further the destruction of local ecosystems in order to connect to others or see our own home and history more clearly. Quoting an unknown source, Lee writes, \u201cLife is like photography. We develop from negatives<\/em>.\u201d Recognition of our own lives and our connection to others is not built via casual voyeurism and exploitation but, rather, through untangling the power relations that continue to define people and place, all the while tending to histories of self, other, and home.
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Anyone Will Tell You<\/em><\/strong><\/a> by Wendy Chin-Tanner, (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019)<\/strong>
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Former LR<\/em> staff writer Wendy Chin-Tanner\u2019s Anyone Will Tell You<\/em> is a strikingly musical and melancholic collection that makes much with very little. Many of the poems are careful arrangements of two or three words in each line\u2014a sparse form that Chin-Tanner developed<\/a> after the birth of her second child. The direct and dynamic relationship between life and art, child and parent, is central to the project of this collection.
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For instance, \u201cIndex\u201d unravels in fits and starts, line by line: \u201cI confess \/\/ I hungered,\u201d the speaker tells us, before recalling, \u201cwait this is \/\/ a poem\u201d (14). Interruptions like these force the question: What is a poem, and who holds power over this definition? These questions prove crucial when a pivotal confession arrives several lines later:
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\u201cwait I should
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say how I
tried to have
another
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and it died\u201d (15).
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In the context of the emotional turmoil and the social stigma surrounding miscarriage, infertility, and the female body, Chin-Tanner\u2019s poetry reveals its power as an aesthetic object. As a stunning site of stuttered rewording, Anyone Will Tell You<\/em> rephrases the alternately devastating and wondrous experiences between self and other that have been scripted by and made unintelligible by exclusionary norms. In Chin-Tanner\u2019s lyrical recursions, silence reemerges into language that holds, rather than abolishes, the unpredictable experiences of self and body. As she writes, \u201call i could do was make \/ my eyes see and not blink, and not look away\u201d (30).
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* * *<\/em>
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What poetry collections have shed light on or transformed your relationships with loved ones? Share them with us in the comments or let us know on<\/em>Twitter<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Facebook<\/em><\/a>, or <\/em>Instagram<\/em><\/a> (@LanternReview).<\/em>
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This month\u2019s poetry round-up features three collections that consider and reconstruct restrictive notions of family, kinship, and relationships. Whether through essayistic reflection, dialogue, or lullaby, the poems from these new works scrutinize the power structures that normalize destructive ways of relating to one another while holding dear the people who can see us with clarity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"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":[4,1160],"tags":[1209,306,1208,698,1206,1207],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7924"}],"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\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7924"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7934,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7924\/revisions\/7934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}