In this essay, I present the section of American poetics that is decidedly one-of-a-kind, in large part because it includes children of immigrants mouthing a foreign tongue, their mother tongue (foreignness and motherland being fraught words that confound them), in thinking about mixed race identity in relation to theater and performance, mixed with archival materials of declassified materials of war as a visual form. I draw from interviews of these poets as source material to look critically at the impulses toward experimentation of form in immigrant writers and writers of recent immigrants to the United States. What does it mean to be “diasporic,” as opposed to rooted in the American homeland? What does it mean to construct a “home” through language? What, after all, can language do for us, when we are the subject and object being described in classified documents, the body counts in memorials, and what can blowing up the lyric form do for poets and their readers? The broadening of American poetry is made possible by a new generation of American poets who expand the possibilities of lyrical poetry by branching out into prose poetry, and the use of the lyric to speak of what it means to be of color, mixed race, or a non-citizen in the United States.



Exploding the Line with Polyvocality: Esteban Rodríguez, Esther Lin, and India Lena González



        Aimé Césaire writes, in Notebook of a Return To a Native Land, that “you could say that I became a poet by renouncing poetry. Do you see what I mean? Poetry was for me the only way to break the stranglehold that accepted French [poetic] form held on me.” Césaire, writing in French, is thinking through and about the possibilities of language that exist outside of constraints of traditional poetic forms that reinforce a pattern of thought. It diverges from his experience of the world, where perhaps there is no “hero,” or protagonist in the epic tradition or a ballad, but a polyphony of voices. Polyvocality where the chorus takes the front and center is fully demonstrated and realized in Lotería by Esteban Rodríguez, Cold Thief Place by Esther Lin and fox woman get out! by India Lena González. These narratives mix the surreal with the harsh realities of undocumented existence in “the beautiful country,” elevating the domestic sphere to tales of valor or impotence around a dinner table in showing/ hiding one’s hand of cards.

In losing the constraint of the line as being a certain number of syllables, and rearranging the poems (as if a deck) that is not purely chronological, Rodríguez pays homage to lotería, or the game of chance. On the spectrum of lyric poetry, prose poetry, and the paragraph, Rodríguez uses the length of the poetic line to straddle the line between the real/ surreal, in a through-composition of each card in the deck which becomes the title of the poems, rendered by the number in the deck followed by the name of the deck Spanish original. By polyvocality, then,  Rodríguez invokes the game of chance as a communal activity, by deploying the storytelling of migration, immigration, assimilation, and survival in the United States, in thinking of the self and the family as entities which tell the story of a people. In “23 La luna,” Rodríguez asks “But again, how could you not personify it? / How could you watch the moon/ from your backyard and not think that / it was watching back, that it was there/ to witness events you can only imagine.” In Rodríguez’s poem, poetry becomes one of witness, as the moon, representing reality, “has betrayed its storybook innocence/ to help the swarm of agents searching for the group she was just in.” There is a certain stateliness in the remove of Rodríguez’s speaker, like a fable or a fairy tale, except the object isn’t the plot per se, but in feeling empathy, ambivalence, and that feeling of estrangement from a thing most dear to you, like the moon, the mother’s hand, or crooked teeth.

This anxiety of exile is in direct focus of the eponymous poem which opens the collection, Cold Thief Place by Esther Lin. Like Rodríguez, Lin uses rhetorical questions throughout her poems. But they answer the rhetorical questions differently on a syntactical level. In “I Was Undocumented for 21 Years. This Is Why I Tell My Story,” Esther Lin makes clear that: “When my family entered this country, my parents warned me of the possible consequences. ‘If you tell anyone you’re illegal, they’ll report you to Homeland Security,’ they’d say. I was four years old. In “Cold Thief Place,” Lin’s staccato end-stopped dependent clauses mirror that deep state of uncertainty and terror of an undocumented child in the United States: “What did I fear more?/ A fire clawing/ its way along my rug. / Offering me what I love best. / Or a man at the door, asking / quietly my name, my date of birth.” The conflation of the speaker of Presbyterian-style eternal damnation with the threat of deportation is made definite by the period, which gives shape to the child’s fear of the unknown, in the figure of the Prophet. Like the moon in Rodríguez’s “La luna,” the prophet in “Cold Thief Place” exerts its power not through speech but through a kind of silent penetration, in the limelight, which signifies both light to see and to be seen.

Within this chasm, where human life is valued based on citizenship status, the narrative between the child-parent is made complex and taut, especially when viewed from the sociological lens of the White patriarchy and East Asian womanhood. The presumption in Chy Lung v. Freeman by officials in San Francisco that the twenty two women from China are “lewd” and “debauched” create the epistolary form  of the poems “Ms. L—Describe your petitioner” and “Mr. F—Describe your beneficiary,” where the power imbalance between the white, male petitioner and the East Asian, female beneficiary is brought to the fore with the “fake marriage” of “men/ who petition for illegal women.” The complication is that the fraud is committed by both the petitioner and the beneficiary upon the government, and the nuance is that the consensual “fake marriage” is marked by the disparate power dynamics between the White male and the Asian female. The redaction of the names of both the petitioner and the beneficiary, with both identified with the first letter of their last name underscore the secrecy that Lin keeps for her characters in fear of repercussions. This anonymity of true life stories and the real pressures of maintaining the facade is brought to the fore within the stories of suicide among prostitutes in Flushing, Queens, brought to the spotlight by the 2021 New York Times article on Jane Doe Ponytail. The nuts and bolts of the grit behind ethnic enclaves like Chinatowns in Flushing, New York, brings to the fore that squalor, desperation, and manipulation coexist hand in hand with the Horatio Alger-like aspirations of upward mobility, to become lawyers, doctors, and engineers.

It is within this background that we are made to understand the sadism of  The Cold Thief Palace’s mother’s corporal punishment and Presbyterian fervor, as the slippage between the . In “Attachment Theory,” the flashback to “those Sunday/ evenings when she opened/ the shower door and beat/ my face and chest with an open palm/ as soap and water ran.” The exertion of violence against the daughter harks back to an earlier poem: “The beautiful country. / That’s what the Chinese call America. // We must have appeared odd. / Three children in identical coats, looking / around in disbelief.”

A similar out of placeness contextualizes but does not fully exculpate the mocking of Rodriguez’s speaker in Lotería. Within the context of Latin American machoism, we begin “47 La corona” with “In your father’s eyes you were basically / a man, and as a man he expected you bear/ his laughter, jabs” and ends with “you were given what you didn’t have to work for, / a life that was always yours to claim.” The “tough love” of the father is premised upon the humanist ideal of striving. The father earns his place in a way that the son does not by “work[ing] for” and “claim[ing]” his personhood in spite of all odds. More than the re-situation of a game of chance, then, the constraint of the deck of cards gives the poet the opportunity to reckon with the meaning of the striving of his family members beyond the linear narrative of a Horatio Alger rags-to-riches American dream.

Both Lotería and Cold Thief Palace confront the hurt in the intergenerational climbing of the social ladder, and the senselessness in the parent-child codependency. Lin writes, “We took turns, the mother demonstrating, / the cub imitating. How to // hurt a person in the way / they allow. Each person allows / for it, sooner or later. My mother // was my first.”

        Eschewing section breaks, India Lena González’s fox woman get out! examines the mythical character of the “fox woman.” In my interview with González about the collection, she writes, “The fox woman, the shapeshifter, is taken from different myths. I didn’t know that when I chose her. I just thought I’ll be a fox and a woman, I’ll put them together, that animal speaks to me. Then I googled her, and found out she already exists within Asian mythology and Native mythology. I read more about her, just to understand how other people in the world were utilizing this character. She’s neither confined to society nor to the natural world. She lives in the in-between.” That in-betweenness evokes and calls upon familial members in an invocation.

Where Lotería and Cold Thief Place each adopt a degree of severity that recalls Louise Glück in Wild Iris, González’s speaker, whose alter ego is the fox woman, can be likened to shouting in a crowded room. And so we begin: “you say: fox woman get out! / smudge it & start again.” If Lotería’s omniscient and prescient narrator looks at events with a degree of certitude in the lookback if not at the why things are the way they are, then the feeling of loneliness, forbearance and joy, then there is a degree of verve and surety in the “parda” that is the speaker. The speaker, in turn, builds on L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry in using the page as a canvas on which font stylization (italics), letter case (capital, all lower case), font size, font are used to mirror

In “uns parda, which is me,” González writes, “nobody is a purebred anymore / i’m a precocious mutt / i know all about small living quarter for / tener-tribed-people like me”. If the speaker in Lotería and Cold Thief Palace are afraid of their difference (their “illegality”) which render their status within their new, adopted homeland precarious, then the speaker of fox woman get out!  uses an ironic sarcasm to shield herself from the class which “tell me i have tuberculosis, so die already.” The relegation of women of color (particular mixed race women of color) in “sensual roles” is played out in “Act ! pose with fingers as though cigarette (puff) (puff).”

If we fathom prose poetry as broad like an urban city block, then González’s poems look to explode the “small living quarters” of New York’s Harlem community in major key, in visions that pay homage to the portals left by the ancestors, of Mami and Big Mama who “sink a rag in hot turpentine oil / & pin it to your chest for healing.”

Through their respective work, Rodriguez, Lin, and González reach not towards arguments but towards a kind of clarity in the complex emotional valences of what it means to be human in an American society that seeks to demean them, through reference points outside of Western mythology and literature.  I am interested in the strategies utilized by these contemporary poets (all within the last 15 years) trouble the American dialectic of “innocence” versus “guilt”, utilized to divide and conquer “true” Americans from “lesser” beings who were sent to internment camps, eradicated in the Cold War, and who were treated as “others” (as ethnic minorities) once they have crossed the border to the United States.



Spheres of Light


In Good Son by Kyle Liang, Primordial by Mai Der Vang, and I’m Always So Serious by Karisma Price, the poets question the lingo and bureaucratic justification of the status quo, though in very different settings defining corporate America, the legacies of colonized Laos / diasporic existence in the United States, and a state driven by police brutality against African Americans.

Liang gives voice to the many Asian-American children of immigrants and health care professionals who observe the way in which language barriers, coverage denials, and the American healthcare crisis create nightmarish scenarios such as when the speaker’s mother was asked to consent to have her Fallopian tubes tied in English, a language she does not speak. On the other hand, the speaker speaks fluent English and the hospital lingo where he works day in and day out. Rather than empowering him, however, we see how the speaker, who gives voice to the mother, is himself the projection of familial pressures and expectations. In my interview with Liang, he writes: “As a ‘good son,’ or American child of Asian immigrants, this led to the question of what I can do with this privilege and responsibility. How I can be a ‘good son’ to not only my family, but also my community and the people around me. For most of my childhood, the only future I imagined for myself was one in which I worked in a hospital because I was raised in a working-class area by immigrant parents with little education, and they let me believe that there was no future outside of working in healthcare. Classic.”

Liang dramatizes the encounter in his prose poem “Nonmalfeasance.” Rather than shying away from scientific and legal terms, Liang spins the conception of “nonmalfeasance” on its head. In the prosaic lingo of American English, Liang begins: “I told the doctor my brother and I are hungry. So he told us to eat our feet. But sir, I said, if we eat our feet then how will we walk home. He told us to make a boat with our bodies and sail home… You can leave your mother’s uterus in your place. Consider it a trade. Two bodies for creation.” Here, the narrative unfolds to uncover the unequal trade at the center of the power imbalance between the non-professional child-speaker and the medical professional. Like the prophet in Lin’s “Cold Thief Palace,” Liang’s doctor insists on order through a consumption of the child-speaker, since there is no such thing as a free lunch.

On a craft level, Liang varies his poetic forms and uses the prose poetry form to mirror the horror vacuum of a never-ending nightmare, where there is no brake to stop the train from collision while spacing out the stanzas (like Gonzalez) to evoke the more extended version of a dream. In this way, Liang follows the footsteps of the poet Daniel Borutzky who often utilizes the prose poem form to meld the realities of the Asian children seeking the assistance from the doctor who quite literally asks the children to trade their mother’s Fallopian tube to sail home, the lyrical manifestation of Liang’s true-life experience in nightmarish form. The staccato function similarly in Lin’s “Cold Thief Place,” allowing for steady world-building that heightens the sense of terror as the patriarchal doctor figure ask the child of immigrant to betray his parent to fully assimilate.

In “A Tracing of our Shoeless Feet,” Liang writes: “momma don’t you know the bus doesn’t come down here anymore / I forget she doesn’t know English too well so I paraphrase / Momma not today.” The space in between the stanza represents the space between English words (language) and between the chasm between two people (the mother and her “good son”) who cannot really truly connect.

If Liang uses the scientific language (the “uterus,” “malfeasance,” etc.) so as to defamiliarize the reader with its usage to justify violences against communities of color, then Price brings the censorship of language to its fore in I’m Always So Serious. In reckoning with and through the personal, familial, racial, historical, and national violences, Price takes the conceit of societal expectations of her as a woman of color that “a wraparound/ porch and white pillars that would only/ see the likes of me if I were / the maid, the midwife, the family / mechanic, Archie manning, the maintenance worker, / or the mailman trusted/ enough to know the gate’s nine digit passcode.” In her Pushcart-winning poem, “My Phone autocorrects ‘Nigga’ to ‘Night,” Price literally asks the reader to turn the book sideways to view at the arrowhead formed by the substitution of the word “night” for “nigga.” Like Gonzalez in fox woman get out!, Price uses the form of the play (Act/ Scene/ Ext.) to highlight the performative aspect of the speaker who society “normalizes” by ironing out what it condescends as non-mainstream or non-normative.

Dark humor takes center stage with Liang’s insistence on morbidity (and opening with the fish bone) and brave encounter with difficult familial collections. Similarly, in Karisma Price’s I’m Always So Serious, pockets of light emerge, as with Price’s collection title and the eponymous poems. In thinking about the meaning behind the recurring sections, Price says, “I wrote the first “I’m Always So Serious” poem being a little tongue-in-cheek. A lot of people think I am more serious than what I really am. I’ve often been told that I have a mean resting face. I don’t think I should have to smile to please people or pretend I’m overjoyed. That’s just my face. But I also feel like a lot of people are uncomfortable with things that aren’t just “happy.” Hearing that I’m so serious so often (as if it’s a bad thing), I decided to write a poem about it. The first poem I ever wrote with that title didn’t make it into the book, but it felt like a steppingstone for the rest of the “serious” poems. I think the others are far more interesting than the first one.” Serious, and unserious poems, in other words, can go hand in hand tongue-in-cheek and exploring important social issues at the same time.

In breaking the intergenerational silence of the dominant narrative wrought by the American imperialist hegemony, Vang’s Primordial takes cues from Monica Sok’s use of “timelines” to re-build the takeover of the timeline of the Vietnam War. The collection examines the saola, which “lives in the Annamite Mountains between Laos / and Vietnam.” “Though locals had long known of the saola, the animal was / first announced to the world in May 1992.” The history and endangerment of the animal parallels the intergenerational trauma of survival, as the speaker asks: “how does war kill an animal/ even as war leaves the animal alone // to flee, to hide, to shelter, / to roam, to gather, to breed, // forcing the animal farther, terra incognita?” The speaker of Primordial is keenly observant of almost mythic quality of the saola in weaving together a cohesive collection featuring disparate sections, including a section of visual poetry with spreads of spheres of “LIGHT” and “LANGUAGE” on the left page with the lyrical interpretation of the murmurations on the right pages: “as I spirit // my eyes open from the inside, / as I know and understand this light / to be kin.”

In this way, Vang literally writes into LIGHT and LANGUAGE where there might be no light at the end of the tunnel of the endangerment and potential disappearance of the saola. Vang resists the perception of saola as only metaphor, but of course its range in the Ammonite mountains, whose hauntings mirror the disbursement of the people of Laos to communities in the United States.  Interspersed across sections are “timelines” that trace the absence and haunting of the speaker’s ancestors and the saola, which are interconnected.

Speaking to the resistance towards a linear reading of her more visual poems, Vang says:

“I once read the “light” poem at an event, and it was interesting to share it on a screen for the audience while reading it aloud. The words “light” and “language” repeat on the page until they coalesce and become superimposed to the point of being indecipherable as words. I read the word “light” once (or maybe twice, or three times?) and then paused before proceeding with the poem. The “node” pieces are meant to be read from left to right, where the line in the middle threads through the entire poem as it connects to sub-lines branching out. But of course, I leave it to my reader. When I wrote these visual poems, I felt a resistance to the line as we know it in poetry, the line being the foundational building block of the poem. I wondered: How might the notion of rupturing the convention of the line in a poem allow for nonlinear possibilities to emerge? I sensed there had to be more to the structure of a line than just the line alone, and that’s how these poems came to be.”

Indeed, in a latter section, the speaker, now a would-be mother who says: “Hmong, may you [live]. Saola, may you go and go.”



The Poet’s Essay


In conceiving of the poet’s essay as a distinct genre, editor Dorothea Lasky writes of the poet’s essay as the antithesis of the five paragraph essay taught in K-12 public schools. She writes: “I’ve long been invested in subverting the essay form that often gets taught in American public schools–the five paragraph essay. I grew up on that form and was taught to mold my thinking to its structure. I feel that such a practice is a disservice to the imagination and to the possibility of language and thought, which arrives unwieldy. In my classes, I often ask students to write poet’s essays, which are not in service to such constrictions and can happen on their own terms.” Poets like Morgan Parker, Brandon Shimoda, and Naoko Fujimoto utilized the essay form to make sense of their existence and as a kind of rewriting of the Genesis of their people (Black Americans, Japanese Americans and Japanese women).

The poet’s essay is readily distinguishable from prose poems though it shares many of the same sensibilities, namely disregard of conventional grammar rules in favor of a voice. As Lasky notes, in lieu of persuasion, what the poet’s essay form does is to pierce the veil of the systematic oppression and prejudices against marginalized groups, and evoking strands of narratives and feelings that go beyond a black-and-white narrative of good versus evil which flattens the nuances in traditional values.

In lieu of the journalistic or memoiristic obsession over chronology, we start in media res in Morgan Parker’s You Get What You Pay For. If Dante walks into the dark forest and Virgil then guides him through the circles of hell, then Parker’s essay collection begins with questioning the need to start from the beginning. She writes: “The first thing you’re supposed to do is introduce yourself. If people don’t know who they’re encountering, they don’t know how to perform the encounter. At which tenor, in what pitch, with how much respect.”

When I asked Parker why she began there, Parker responded: “I really resist chronology, and I didn’t want this to be a traditional or straightforward memoir where it’s like, First I was born, then this and that, because first of all, that’s not how I experience time or narrative. Another thread throughout the book is that there’s no way to tell things in order because we’re always having to look back. In the end, it was helpful to open up that question of Where is the beginning? with a mixture of the personal present and past, giving a bit of myself as a child, my understanding of myself back then, and a hint toward how that has changed.”

The poet’s essay, then, becomes the sounding board towards a real reckoning of Morgan Parker as a Black American andas an individual going through therapists, with a father who tells her that Black people do not need therapy. Rather than villain, Parker contextualized the thinking behind her father’s words, as she grows up in a predominantly White neighborhood. Using the linkages and chasms between one chapter to the next, and one seemingly discrete essay to the next, Parker looks at the connection between the need of therapy with the continual legacies of slavery by allowing for the piecing together of the throughline of values inculcated by mass media and pedagogical presumptions in Parker’s mostly-white neighborhood growing up. Parker achieves this through the dialogue and wider range of possibilities made available by the extension of lines into paragraphs, which allow for natural-sounding dialogue from her therapist, her schoolteacher, and the tour guide to filter in alongside with her interiority, speaking back. She writes, “Everyone is terrible, and putting yourself out there actually means putting yourself into the phone, where someone might actually be looking.”

In the essay “Peace Plaza” in The Afterlife is Letting Go, Brandon Shimoda writes of a woman who thanked him for reading the timeline mounted on the wall on Japanese-American history between 1948-1960 also tell him “We’re beyond that” when he explained that he is writing about Japanese-American incarceration. The collection itself begins with “Paper Flowers” which opens with the image of James Hatsuaki Wakasa, a 63 year old man who was shot dead as he looked for “arrowheads, trilobites, or usual stones.” The 1943 murder of sixty-three year old Wakasa, one of 8,130 Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans incarcerated in Topaz, Utah sets up the dialectic of “innocence” versus “guilt”, and the divide within the Japanese community over whether and how to display loyalty, grieve and memorialize the legacy of anti-Japanese racism and violence in the United States.

In my conversation with Shimoda, he said that the Prologue, hones in on “Wakasa’s murder (by a white guard, proxy for the nation)” since the murder “and the memorialization of it are, for me, perfect examples of how the “event” of Japanese American incarceration is ‘still ongoing,’”

In straddling between the group of Japanese-Americans eager to assimilate and move on from the trauma of internment camps in museums that exhibit the artistry of the interned Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Americans who are uneasy by the categorical exhibition of these artifacts of trauma. While it is crystal clear where Shimoda (and for that matter Parker) stands on the issue of reparation and “letting go,” what the Poet’s Essay allows is a degree of polyphony that is unbroken by white space. The essay form for Shimoda, “many of which began as autonomous essays or talks,” consisted of “each [essay] reflecting, or reporting from, a phase of [his] learning.” As with Parker’s essay, the same allows the melding of history (through thorough research while also being expansive enough to make space for choral chapters that synthesizes the survey responses Shimoda received from Japanese Americans who lived through or are descendants of Japanese Americans who lived through internment camps.

One particularly innovative use of the poet’s essay form can be found in the chapbook Nine Japanese Women Poets. As its title implies, the collection features the waka of nine Heian woman poets, translated by Fujimoto, and each poet is introduced with a trifold interpretation, with ink illustrations by the poet-translator to add a sense of whimsy. As a chapbook, Nine stretches the possibilities of hybridity by introducing to the English-speaking audience some of the best waka poems from the 7th to 12th centuries by Japanese woman-poets.

For each spread, first comes a persona poem in the style of a haibun, written by Fujimoto in each woman’s respective voice; this is then followed by the waka, which is displayed in English translation, romanized hiragana, and the original Japanese; the waka and the poet are then further construed in a personal lyric essay. In these pages, Fujimoto takes us through the work and lives of Sei Shōnagon, Fujiwara no Teishi, Murasaki Shikibu, Kōkamonin no Bettō, Izumi Shikibu, Koshikibu no Naishi, Ukon, Daini no Sanmi, and Empress Shōshi.

To illustrate, in the “07” spread, Fujimoto translates Ukon, “You’ll forget me, that’s fine. My one lament: / Gods may swipe you from this world for your broken promise.” In the lyrical essay, Fujimoto continues to tell how noroi-curses work. She brings in her mother’s voice, as it trembles: “You father quit his job many times.” “men have to work and take care of women. Women raise children. My mother is still changing his diaper every six hours.”

The act of translation is an act of translating the love that noted Japanese noble women have for their beloved through the lens of a modern Japanese poet, in the experience in imbibing, struggling through and reaching a kind of resonance with these women through the strict gender normativity in school.  If the essay form allowed Parker and Shimoda to meld Black-American and Japanese-American history with their day-to-day lives/ historical research, then what the haibun/ waka/ lyrical essay form does for Fujimoto is create a synthesis of possibilities beyond the borders of one form or the other, much as she holds a myriad of experiences, expectations in her daily life as a Japanese poet living and writing in Chicago, Illinois.

        As a critic, I am particularly drawn to and excited by small and independent presses featuring debut and more established poets using form/ hybridity to look at an American core that is foreign, and not easily assimilable. While some of the poets I examine are published with larger or more established presses, there is a degree of willingness to experiment to give shape to the experience of being an immigrant, a child of immigrants, diasporic or marginalized existence, where social normativity threatens the existence of the poet’s very community. I appreciate how the poets that I have examined have seen clearly how American society is not just a straightforward rosy colored golden-brick road but one in which language itself becomes a hierarchy of power. Through various approaches, the poets examine its historical oppressions of marginalized identities, as an imperialist hegemony and the border, in turn, as a geographical demarcation as well as one of socioeconomic class.