Of an animal, especially a bird. A wandering species whom no seas nor places limit. A seed who survives despite the depths of hard winter. The ripple of a herring
steering her band from icy seas to warmer strands. To find the usual watering-places despite the gauze of death that shrouds our eyes
is a breathtaking feat. Do you ever wonder why we felt like happy birds brushing our feathers on the tips of leaves? How we lifted our toes
from one sandbank and landed – fingertips first – on another? Why we clutched the dumb and tiny creatures of flower and blade and sod between our budding fists?
From an origin of buried seeds emerge these many-banded dagger wings. We, of the sky, the dirt, and the sea. We,
the seven-league-booters and the little-by-littlers. We, transmigrated souls, will prevail. We will carry ourselves into the realms of light.
This selection comes from Cleave, available from Hub City Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Leah Silvieus.
Tiana Nobile is a Korean American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. A finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and the Texas Review, among others. Her full-length poetry debut, Cleave, is forthcoming in Spring 2021 by Hub City Press. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. For more, visit www.tiananobile.com. Follow at @tiananob
Leah Silvieus was born in South Korea and adopted to the U.S. at three-months old. She grew up in small towns in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley and western Colorado. She is the author of Anemochory (Hyacinth Girl Press), Season of Dares (Bull City Press), Arabilis (Sundress Publications) and co-editor with Lee Herrick of the poetry anthology, The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books). She is a recipient of awards and fellowships from Kundiman, The Academy of American Poets, and Fulbright and serves as a mentor on The Brooklyn Poets Bridge. A 2019-2020 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Fellow, Leah serves as a senior books editor at Hyphen magazine and an associate editor at Marginalia Review of Books. Her reviews and criticism have appeared in the Harvard Review Online, The Believer, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Whitworth University, an MFA from the University of Miami, and is currently an MAR candidate in Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School/Institute of Sacred Music. Prior to Yale, she spent several years traveling between New York and Florida as a yacht chief stewardess.
By myself at that late hour, I study the uniformed rows— months and months of potential meals boxed and lining the freezer. I fling open the glass door. It’s not only the burst of cold that’s so startling, but a kiss, warm at the nape that makes me
flush, and two arms around my waist pulling me in against the sleepy memory of one man’s body. There’s no time to be afraid. The best way to remember is to forget. Glancing over my shoulder, I recognize the familiar outline
of a face, a quirky grin. Pressed against him, my back is warm, my face, cold—too close to the frozen door. He hugs me tight. I feel a rhythmic thud, the battering knot of his heart. “There are no fres to winnow,” he says as if he’s been gone a while,
which startles me awake. The bedroom window is wide open. Winter washes over me, frost on the glass pane.
This selection comes from Wider than the Sky, available from Diode Editions. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.
Nancy Chen Long is the author of Light into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017), winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, as well as the chapbook Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). She is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Her work was selected as the winner of the 2019 Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award and featured in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Indiana Humanities. She works at Indiana University in the Research Technologies division. nancychenlong.com Follow at @NancyChenLong
Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about gender and diversity issues. She’s also the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe and the Non-Fiction Editor of Doubleback Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Selkie Literary Magazine, and Writing Class Radio. She’s currently an MFA Nonfiction candidate at Vermont College of Fine Art and lives in Riverview, Florida.
sitting under a willow my mother wails head drooped and to this day I let myself feel sometimes she is instead singing even though she is not here hummingbirds hover overhead around a blue glass feeder glass over her head one day thrown against a cedar hollowed with holes the way she is hollowed now cross-legged on the grass cutting her face out of all of the family photos holy holy holy she sings who was, and is, and evermore shall be holding memories in her hand holing every memory
This selection comes from Wider than the Sky, available from Diode Editions. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.
Nancy Chen Long is the author of Light into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017), winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, as well as the chapbook Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). She is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Her work was selected as the winner of the 2019 Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award and featured in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Indiana Humanities. She works at Indiana University in the Research Technologies division. nancychenlong.com Follow at @NancyChenLong
Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about gender and diversity issues. She’s also the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe and the Non-Fiction Editor of Doubleback Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Selkie Literary Magazine, and Writing Class Radio. She’s currently an MFA Nonfiction candidate at Vermont College of Fine Art and lives in Riverview, Florida.
In anticipation of his fifth poetry collection, The Valley, and its 2021 debut, Sundress Publications author Esteban Rodriguez sat down with our Editorial Intern, Lee Anderson, to discuss emptiness, memories, and how syntax can bring family back together.
Lee Anderson: The pictures throughout the book were originally taken by your mother and sister, Maria and Iris Pérez. Tell me about your decisions to use their pictures, which ones to place, and where you placed them.
Esteban Rodriguez: When I originally conceived of The Valley, I knew I wanted photographs included, not necessarily in the ekphrastic sense (although the photos can undoubtedly be seen in that light), but as a way to compliment the poems and visually document the landscape of the Rio Grande Valley (located in deep South Texas—no, not San Antonio, think five hours south). I read Austerlitz, The Rings of Saturn, and The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald in grad school, and I was quite fascinated by the way he included photographs throughout his novels. For me, they don’t so much as add to the novels as they do accompany the texts, and if I could do the same, in a poetry collection, then why not?
I live in Austin, and my visits to the Valley have become less frequent throughout the years. But my family still lives there, and I asked if they would be willing to undertake a small project in the spring/summer of 2019. My mother had just retired, and my sister, who’s dabbled in photography over the years, had just graduated from nursing school and had some free time on her hands before she began work.
There was no way not to include first photo at the beginning of the collection, which is the house that I grew up in. It’s quite old now, and my aunt lives there, and visually, I think it embodies many houses throughout the Valley, especially those in the colonias or that aren’t defined by the city limits of Weslaco (my hometown). Each photo is meant to add to the overall narrative, as well as show the places that I would frequent with my family—the border between the U.S. and Mexico, church, Downtown McAllen, South Padre Island, all of which have, in some shape or form, defined me.
LA: Homemade medicine and cures are common motifs throughout the book, often intersected by family and self-reliance. Considering especially the lines “her body like all bodies not immunized / to the circumstances they’ve inherited” (from “Recuerdo: Wardrobes”), how does medicine work in terms of passing down tradition?
ER: Growing up, my family was very wary of going to the doctor’s office, especially my grandmother, who was from Mexico. It was recommended we try home or over-the-counter remedies first (Vicks, Robitussin, prayers and prayer candles under the bed), and if that didn’t work, then a few days rest—no doubt in my mother’s and grandmother’s eyes—would do the trick. What wasn’t so easily revealed to us (us children that is), is that our access to insurance and therefore medical services wasn’t always available, and if it was (my mother did work for the state of Texas), the bills that would results from a visit, or even a hospital stay, were much greater than we had budgeted for the month. We had to rely on what we had, and hopefully that was enough to get us through another day.
LA: Can you speak to the recurring images of circuses, fairs, and fairgrounds?
ER: The Rio Grande Valley Livestock Show and Rodeo happens every year in the Valley in March (usually during Spring Break), and growing up, this was definitely one of the events to look forward. I have always been fascinated with fairs and circuses because of the promise they offer—adrenaline on every roller coaster ride; small and large prizes and rewards at every booth; satisfaction with funnel cakes, turkey legs, and cotton candy. What was there not to love about the Stock Show? What is common throughout the Valley too is traveling circuses and carnivals that pop up throughout the year. You can usually find them off an empty lot of some frontage road, and with them there are families that show up, walking throughout the grounds, hoping to experience something beyond the ordinary, even if just for a night.
LA: In “Recuerdo: Summer, 1996” you write, “and the world has moved on / framing the horizon with heavy-handed themes // of loneliness and loss.” How does the heaviness of loneliness and loss in the world intersect with, or contradict, your own visions of solitude throughout the book?
ER: In many ways, it’s hard not to feel that the Valley lives in a bubble, especially as a child when it appeared that the entire world existed outside of the Valley. When I tell people who are not familiar with Texas (and even some that are) that I am from South Texas, they automatically think of San Antonio. I have to explain that I am from a town five hours south of San Antonio, near the Mexican border, and every time I do explain, I think of the limbo (or what feels like a limbo) that exits between San Antonio and the Valley. I don’t mean to snub everyone who lives in that area, but for me, and many of the people I grew up with, it wasn’t a whole lot more different than the Valley itself, and I think that is where the ideas of solitude come from in the book. No one, despite their claims otherwise, wants to be lonely, and perhaps writing these poems was a way to bring the loneliness out, to let the world serve as company to my past self.
LA: Many of these poems consider ideas of growing up and coming-of-age, yet it is not often the object of focus; when it is, such as in “McAllen,” the idea seems distant. How does the decentering of these sorts of rituals shift how we view ourselves and the world?
ER: I always have an eye on the past, and my first three poetry collections (Dust & Dust, Crash Course, and In Bloom) were primarily about my childhood. My fourth collection, (Dis)placement, departed from that narrative, focusing more on diaspora and violence through a surreal lens, and there are hints of that surrealism in the poem “El río” in The Valley. Having ideas of growing up and coming-of-age as the center of focus is, for me, important and I think it helps illuminate the way I view my upbringing, my identity, and the essence of the Valley, but decentering it, and looking at it from the outside oftentimes has the same effect.
LA: How do memories, such as those in the poems titled with “Recuerdo”, impact the way we view the past and affect the ways we think about our presents and potential futures?
ER: I think these poems help navigate the past more than they do the present or future. These poems were initially written years before the other poems in the collection, but I couldn’t find a way for them to fit in my previous books (and there were some of them that needed major revisions). In my view, these poems allowed me to explore more of the past than I thought was possible, looking at the landscape of my childhood home, my uncles and their obsessions, or how we sought to heal our bodies. When I exhumed them from the depth some nearly obscure computer file, I was able to connect with those moments more intimately, and it was quite cathartic to relive what I thought would be forgotten.
LA: How do you see the dichotomy, or overlap, of empty settings and people out of space in these poems?
ER: In the Valley, there are a lot of empty lots and spaces that have remained empty since I was a child. There are also empty buildings and plazas that were never rented out, and if they were, those businesses never seemed to last long. One of the most influential collections (and one that I continue to recommend to everyone who writes, not just poets) is Night of the Republic by Alan Shapiro, which explores public places throughout America—gas station restroom, supermarket, shoe store, convention hall. The poems are devoid of people, but people seem to haunt even corner of it, and there are many places in the Valley similar to that that I wanted to capture. I wanted the poem to mirror what I visually saw and having an unpunctuated narrative helped the ideas flow easier across the page. I am also a faithful reader of Cormac McCarthy’s works, and it’s definitely possible to use as little punctuation in your work.
LA: Tell me about the particular syntax of these poems, particularly the use of enjambment and blank spaces between phrases in individual lines.
ER: W.S. Merwin’s The Vixen was the foundation for my book, specifically with regards to the lack of punctuation and the enjambment. If you’ve read Merwin’s work, you know it’s infamous for its absence of periods, commas, semicolons, etc., and I wanted to explore my own work through this approach as well. But I wanted to distinguish the poems with titles of city names from the “Recuerdo” poems, mainly because the “Recuerdo” poems are meant to explore the past more thoroughly. These poems have spaces to indicate a pause and spread out the speaker’s thoughts (they also provide some breathing room for the reader).
LA: “El río” is a multi-page prose poem ending in three and a half pages of names. Can you speak to the narrative weight of that poem?
ER: My fascination with surrealism stems from the work of certain artists: Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Kay Sage, and Jeff Jordan, the artist who provided the artwork for three of The Mars Volta’s albums, Amputechture, The Bedlam in Goliath, and Octahedron (I should note The Mars Volta has been quite influential in my own writing, and the manner in which they could produce concept albums with such a lyrical, strange, and surreal force continues to be a source of inspiration).
“El río” is meant to document my father’s journey into the United States, but through a hallucinatory/surreal approach. The father in the poem finds himself in various and almost impossible places throughout his crossing, and the river plays a central role in how it defines his trek into another country, often times attempting to keep him from completing it. My father’s journey is by no means unique, and at the end of the poem you see names that are meant to be representations of those who have lost their lives trying to make a new and better life, especially those who have never been recovered or found.
LA: Which poem(s) in this collection is/are closest to your heart?
ER: I would say that I’m perhaps closest to the “Recuerdo” poems, mainly because they were poems that didn’t fit into prior books, and I was able to use them fittingly here. Paul Valéry said that a poem is never finished, but only abandoned. I’m not sure to what extend I agree with Valéry, but I no doubt salvaged these poems and found a home for them here.
Esteban Rodriguez is the author of the collections Dusk & Dust (Hub City Press, 2019), Crash Course (Saddle Road Press, 2019), In Bloom (SFASU Press, 2020) and (Dis)placement (Skull + Wind Press, 2020). His poetry has appeared in Boulevard, The Rumpus, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He is the Interviews Editor for EcoTheo Review, an Assistant Poetry Editor for AGNI, and a regular reviews contributor for PANK and Heavy Feather Review. He lives with his family in Austin, Texas.
Lee Anderson is a nonbinary MFA candidate at Northern Arizona University, where they are the Managing Editor of Thin Air Magazine. They have been published sporadically but with zest, with work seen or forthcoming in The Rumpus, Columbia Journal, Unstamatic Magazine, and elsewhere.
“Your Brain Doesn’t Contain Memories—It is Memories”
—after Emily Dickinson
Monarch butterflies may take up to five generations to migrate, the needless veer across Lake Superior etched eons ago into their shared mind. Had a mountain once been there? Origin is unimportant—avoidance is
the thing recorded. My ancestor’s mountains are mine as well. The deeper the memory, the less sure its source. A mind can be more like sponge than machine. I once heard that avoidance flows from father, not mother—the mouse trained to fear cherry blossoms will mark that fear in his sea
of sperm. Modified DNA, a matter of survival. His offspring for generations will run in terror of that scent. We humans hold fast to words. Into a Rolodex of symbols, we accumulate them. Mother. Father. Yours. Mine. A matter of identity. Language is the blue
chalk of childhood. To remember, we need to be able to name. To name is to word, & to word is to grant meaning. As a child, words came out of the blue— those I made up with my sister, then later, with my own children. The
urge to language, any language will do. We are wired to babble—one person’s syllable is another’s sound. Still, each spring, hummingbirds return to the missing feeder. In a room in my brain, Mother sings. Father, in another,
says It pays to increase your word power. A new word, confabulation. He & I will chant it together. I’ll draw a line from it to the room of fabulous fable. We absorb our parent’s fire the way a sunflower soaks up the sun. Our heads follow light, as
all livings things do. To keep her memory-rooms blameless, a daughter sponges off the family’s stains, collects & recycles buckets of water. She scrubs every room clean, the way she’s been taught to do—
This selection comes from Wider than the Sky, available from Diode Editions. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.
Nancy Chen Long is the author of Light into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017), winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, as well as the chapbook Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). She is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Her work was selected as the winner of the 2019 Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award and featured in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Indiana Humanities. She works at Indiana University in the Research Technologies division. nancychenlong.com Follow at @NancyChenLong
Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about gender and diversity issues. She’s also the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe and the Non-Fiction Editor of Doubleback Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Selkie Literary Magazine, and Writing Class Radio. She’s currently an MFA Nonfiction candidate at Vermont College of Fine Art and lives in Riverview, Florida.
We who go empty-clad die a little each day, our backwater bodies too stagnant
for a martyr’s melancholy. Consolation is too much a late ship. Never the strange
fires here, only moonseed and hemlock. Only a bereft people who cling to a thing once worshipped.
O idols, worshipped idols. It is because of you that I never went to sea.
This selection comes from Wider than the Sky, available from Diode Editions. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.
Nancy Chen Long is the author of Light into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017), winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, as well as the chapbook Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). She is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Her work was selected as the winner of the 2019 Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award and featured in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Indiana Humanities. She works at Indiana University in the Research Technologies division. nancychenlong.com Follow at @NancyChenLong
Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about gender and diversity issues. She’s also the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe and the Non-Fiction Editor of Doubleback Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Selkie Literary Magazine, and Writing Class Radio. She’s currently an MFA Nonfiction candidate at Vermont College of Fine Art and lives in Riverview, Florida.
Kimberly Ann Priest’s still life(PANK, 2020) is a collection of 21 poems whose titles each begin with “my pedophile,” followed by various characterizing details of the subject, such as “my pedophile is obsessed with details” and “my pedophile experiences superficial pleasure.” The juxtaposition of these two words highlights the theme of violent ownership explored throughout this text—the ownership the abuser enacts on the speaker, and the ways in which the speaker’s childhood trauma continues to affect her adult life.
In focusing each of these poems on the cause of the speaker’s trauma through her eyes, the text feels tightly controlled, letting us focus on one image of the pedophile, followed by another, and another, and another. This collection functions as a still life—just as the title suggests—and the last poem, “my pedophile loves like still life,” cements this: snapshots of a life frozen in time, and thus paradoxically making it impossible for them to be forgotten. These poems serve to both stop time and demand its steady progression, as the events from the speaker’s past continue to permeate her present and future: “if it is ambivalence / … how its eyes make a horror of laughter / its simpering witnesses texting themselves clean” (“my pedophile dates all my future partners”).
If the most traditional way to represent trauma in writing is by creating fragments that portray a convoluted and interrupted sense of time, Priest pushes this concept even further, asserting that trauma doesn’t just interrupt time, but completely redefines it, just as the pedophile is shown reshaping the face of a clock through actions that read as injurious yet gentle. still life echoes other documentations of trauma, such as Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House and Donika Kelly’s Bestiary, in its witnessing of how trauma warps memory and distorts time. Through these poems, we see growth stilted in the image of a raisin as “not a proper grape,” growth obscenely depicted yet punished in the image of folded towels “overextending the limits of their allowable girth,” and growth as something abandoned as an afterthought, in the image of a pried-open and picked over piece of frosted cake “neglected / discarded with the trash”. Childhood and the past are depicted as a source of terror through such objects as hollow, Barbie-like dolls whose value is measured by their ability to be posed (“my pedophile prefers my childhood”).
Priest inverts stereotypical sexual language and images throughout her poems, such as a person stepping out of a shower and the suggestion of a glass of wine, illustrating the thin line that exists between sex and violence. Priest does this most noticeably in relation to food: “if it is factual / it is a raisin desiccating in his belly” (“my pedophile has a discerning palette”) or “and if she is nude the eggs are undercooked / … the way he sets the knife at the edge of the plate after preening yellow yolk from its teeth and never talks about porn or nudity or sex yet I feel photographed” (“my pedophile produces a cinematic frame”). The lushness of the language draws us to its words, while the violence bubbling into the scene turns our insides sour. Like how we are viewing all of this through the speaker’s eyes, these poems force us to reckon with our own complicity in such voyeuristic violence as readers.
What is so powerful about still life is that it reclaims the horror inflicted on the speaker in the most subtle, quiet way, straddling the line between survivor narrative and victim narrative. By muddying the progression of time and the portrayal of characteristics (actions are shown as violent and gentle), we understand that there is no point at which the trauma of the speaker’s childhood is simply “stopped” or “conquered.” The speaker’s pedophile is a multifaceted character with so much depth that we, as readers, aren’t quite sure what to make of him. Except—and this is one of the many strengths of this book—despite being shown as a complicated human with problems of his own, the horror and violence of his actions—both shown and implied—are neither lessened nor dismissed. The speaker shows us the terror of her reality by portraying her abuser as a fully-fledged person, someone with depth and texture, who nonetheless does terrible things.
Priest’s forthcoming book, Slaughter the One Bird, will be published by Sundress Publication this year, and her most recent book, Parrot Flower, was released earlier this year by Glass Poetry Press. Her chapbook White Goat Black Sheep was released by Finishing Line Press in 2018. She describes her writing as carefully observing the intersections of gender violence, narrative identities, embodiment, trauma, and environmental issues as well as survival, wildness, joy, and grief. still life is a moving and masterful addition to her work.
Though I do maintain a bookshelf, what I prize most is my book stack. While I think bookshelves sometimes come with a more static and permanent connotation, my book stack is definitively an always-changing assemblage. Perched on my desk, it reflects what I’m currently reading or what’s next in the queue. At the moment, it’s been growing at a faster rate than I can keep up with, becoming a bit Leaning Tower of Pisa-esque. It’s organized chaos in a way that I think nicely suits and summarizes my reading habits.
At any given time, there’s predictably a balance of nonfiction, literary classics for class, poetry, and novels. A constant is my journal, currently the lovely orange companion towards the top of the stack. It fits in well, as the things I read are inextricable from the way I experience life, and always make their way into its pages. Sandwiched between the books are stray bookmarks and cards from friends this holiday season. Some of these—Strayed, Woolf, and Murakami—were gifted to me, and the stack helps to especially highlight their presence, reminding me of the people behind the books. This pile is really a snapshot of the words I’m taking in, bookended by my reflections on those texts.
I’m very interested in prose poetry at the moment, so I’ve been reading The Crying Book and diving into a re-read of Citizen and Bluets. It’s especially interesting to me how amenable the form is, and how conducive it is to writing about emotion and grief in an expansive but fragmentary, almost methodical manner. The genre is so rich that it practically lends itself to re-reading, a practice I’ve really embraced in the past few months. I love seeing a book reappear in the stack; I think the stack has helped me understand that reading is meant to be a process, a cycle,
As always, I love thinking about how literature is an agent for change and connection. I’ve been reading Dark Money, in which Jane Mayer is able to describe the indescribable scale of the modern American conservative political movement. And my Literature Humanities class—a core class at Columbia—has guided me to read or revisit some of the most canonized Western texts, such as Dante’s Inferno. After inhabiting the texts themselves, it lets us make connections among texts and beyond.
My actual bookshelf functions more as an archive. It’s further away, out of my immediate reach, lined with books I want to keep forever. These I know I will return to after being away at college; they are my touchstones. Most are poetry books by authors I consider indirect mentors and literary ancestors, with the occasional long-form exception: Jia Tolentino, more Woolf, Hanif Abdurraqib, Ross Gay, Jenny George, and Jenny Xie.
Last year, I read 52 books (the final number was unintentional, honestly, but I’m glad it worked out that way). Most were from the library and many were ebooks, especially as I began reading more during New York’s spring lockdown. I’ve also begun leaning into audiobooks, and thinking about the different ways we’ve developed to consume and appreciate different types of books. Accordingly, I’ve liked thinking outside the sequential order of the bookshelf. Though I’m at home now, I think I’ll be exporting this book stack model to my college dorm, whenever it’s safe to do so. It helps me keep reading close.
Claire Shang is a freshman at Columbia University, where she is an editor with The Columbia Review. She is a writer of poetry and creative nonfiction, and a reader of mostly everything. Her work has appeared in or been recognized by Peach Mag, No, Dear Magazine, and Smith College.
Sundress intern Julie Leung interviewed Muriel Leung (no relation) in advance of her second book, Imagine Us, The Swarm. This award-winning collection of essays in verse explores past, present, and future with fearlessness and courage, examining immigration, racism, and xenophobia, along with trauma, loss, and grief, the current racializing of disease, and the hope of collective healing.
JL: To begin, please tell me about the inspiration that guided you to create the cover art.
ML: When I first imagined the cover for Imagine Us, The Swarm, I knew I wanted to feature the faces of the women in my family. The book very much is an exploration of my own relationship to gender, race, and resiliency, lessons which I learned from women in my family, from witnessing the strength of other Asian American women and femmes. I had envisioned silhouettes since I wanted the faces to be recognizably Asian though not my family members’ exact likeness so that another Asian person looking at the cover would see someone who might resemble them or their family.
I remembered the photos I had seen in albums of my mother when she was younger, the rare family portraits she had of my grandmother, my great grandmother. I knew I wanted to represent them in some way, so I asked my mother to send me the digital copies of the photos, and I drew silhouettes of them based on these portraits, showing them to my mother when I was done. She said, “Yeah, I guess that looks like me,” and that was that. The final design of the cover is by Rissa Hochberger who offered me different colors for the cover. I hesitated with the yellow at first but am so glad I was persuaded to keep it. I was not immediately conscious of it at the time, but my friend and fellow poet Phuong Vuong pointed out that the cover graphic felt like a historical continuance of Yellow Pearl, an art book developed by the Basement Workshop, an Asian American political arts collective in the 1970s.
JL: Can you share the evolution between Bone Confetti and Imagine Us, The Swarm?
ML: I wrote the bulk of Bone Confetti during my MFA and was very much influenced by the aesthetic of living in Louisiana during those years, a place which is overbrimming with equal parts life and haunting. The book is set in a speculative landscape filled with ghosts, parades, weddings, and funerals—a deeply macabre project that felt emblematic of where my mind was at the time, that only highly figurative language could convey. I was very much interested in casting so many veils that something truly sharp and uncomfortable about grief might emerge from the thick.
I began writing Imagine Us, The Swarm once Bone Confetti was getting ready to launch, wanting to reflect on what it means to write a book, a type of creative labor that compels us to look so closely at difficult subjects to the point of emotional exhaustion. I was reminded of the ways in which my father worked hard all his life until his passing, and that his work ethic lives through me. Labor is always racialized, particularly for the restaurant industry where my father worked. Due to racism and xenophobia, Chinese restaurants were one of the few places where Chinese immigrants in the U.S. could find employment after the construction of the transcontinental railroad. So, in a way, there’s a historical continuity there where my father found his place; it bred in him a certain devotion to the model minority myth, believing that hard work would allow him to overcome racial barriers. In his passing, I think he realized that this belief was flawed. In remembering him, I want this new book to narrate the past differently so that the future of us could be revised. This was what coursed through my mind in the writing of Imagine Us, The Swarm. There is no In Absentia-land, no lovers walking into their doom—just me, alone, talking to my past and future.
JL: How about your choices with punctuation and form?
ML: When I think about punctuation, I think about the “not silent,” that something like ellipses or brackets indicate a filling of space, so that even if sound does not reside there, there is still breath. In the essay-in-verse, “This is to live several lives,” for instance, I use the ellipses like an elongated buzz throughout the course of that piece, just as bees populate its content. I don’t see it as disruption or limitation but as a way of speaking to the supposed gaps and absences of our history, gesturing to how perhaps they were never blank spaces to begin with.
JL: What about the role of myth? The work references both the story of Orpheus and Eurydice and also the family myth of the father swimming to Hong Kong. The book ends with a focus on planets and celestial beings, more mythology. How does mythology shape who we become?
ML: The reference to Orpheus and Eurydice recalls the myth that informs Bone Confetti. In my first book, I modeled the relationship of two lovers after the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in which the former pursues the latter in the underworld only to lose her again. The first book was about perpetual loss, what it means to lose and lose again. I reference it once more in Imagine Us, The Swarm because I realized that even after the completion of one book, the subject matter was still never exhausted. The loss and grief forge ahead with new shape, new contours.
As a writer, I do think I’m constantly participating in a new myth-making. Even as I narrate stories about my family, they still possess a certain bias and memory that are several steps removed from the absolute truth. Furthermore, in asserting an absolute truth, wouldn’t I be perpetuating the same harm of silencing through a compulsory singular narrative? Is there a way in which there can be multiple truths? I suppose in my myth-making, I am not necessarily trying to access an absolute truth, but looking at the myriad ways in which it is refracted.
The myth of my father’s migration, of my grandfather’s before him. The myth of celestial bodies. The myth of Greek poets who search the depths of hell for their love, losing them once again. One definition of a myth can be that it is a story that is not concerned with a truth grounded in realism but that communicate an emotional lesson. What did I learn? My familial history is barbed and contains a legacy of pain. On occasion, someone has tried to reverse it. Did it work? I am asking.
JL: “The ghost of my future visits my past and tells her You have to be brave.” Fear and courage are themes in this collection, both on a personal intimate level, as experienced by individuals in the family, and also on a collective level in groups. How do fear and courage shape this work?
ML: I think it takes a tremendous amount of courage to face your trauma. In the line you mentioned, I imagine what it would be like to visit my past self, a new survivor and constantly questioning my own experiences. What would it be like to receive this message from my future self, someone who I imagine to be more fortified than I am right now, who can tell my younger self that while I cannot change what happened, I will live through this?
My family, in assorted faces, had to channel their courage to face the political turmoil of their home country, to build a life for themselves in the U.S., and to brave illness and the hardships along the way. I often feel like trauma leads to isolation, this feeling that we must endure what we suffered alone. I felt tremendous guilt for years that I could not live up to my family’s sacrifices, and that undermined my own pain and suffering. What would it be like if we made space for the various ways in which we endured? To offer each other compassion?
I realize in writing Imagine Us, The Swarm, that it would not do me any good to portray anyone in my family as villain or hero, but that some have inherited the trauma of previous generations more than others. No one gets to be on a pedestal; there is no redemptive narrative. I want to remember my family exactly as they are—flawed and having survived.
JL: Let’s talk about the themes of resistance, defiance, and obstinance, in contrast to allegiance and loyalty (disloyalty). How do these tensions affect the narrator’s identity – specifically race, gender, and queerness? “But my queerest self, buckling against the frame, is something other”.
ML: If defiance means resistance to a naturalized order of things, then it feels especially necessary as a queer Asian American woman. Growing up in a homophobic, racist, and misogynist world, the rule of law typically privileges those identities with social power. If we don’t resist, then we risk perpetuating the law as simply natural or organic to the way things are, which means that we commit to the belief that we are inferior, less than, or constantly in deference to those in power. I question any rule of law that assumes allegiance by default, recognizing that opposition is a strategic move that can model another kind of life. I believe that there are those who would prefer to maintain the order of things as they are because they either benefit from it or are scared to imagine alternatives. I want my resistance to foster a greater imagination of what could be instead of what already is.
JL: The (holiday) tree with the angel propped up on chopsticks – and the noted “inheritance” – is a vivid image. Could you share more about the inheritance children receive from immigrant parents?
ML: The angel propped up on chopsticks is very much a real memory! Growing up, my parents tried to perform as many American holiday traditions as they could. One of these included getting a plastic tree, which has become bent from many years of being shoved into boxes in the corner of the basement. One year, we found a Christmas angel and could not figure out how to get it to stay up on the tree. My mother had the brilliant idea of creating a pair of stilts for the angel using a pair of chopsticks and a rubber band. We thought it looked so ridiculous, but it worked! And that pretty much sums up my relationship to a lot of American traditions, the level of artifice. I suppose you can say that this is very much an immigrant approach to American traditions, which is the constant reinterpretation of its common rituals and objects. The way, for instance, we would make wonton soup with macaroni or eat roast duck instead of turkey.
As someone born in the U.S., I guess you can say I inherited this approach in my poetics. I do believe that the English language in particular lends itself to reinterpretation, that by constantly transforming it, we do take away some of its dominant power.
JL: “The Plural Circuits of Tell” speaks to the current rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, using a creative form to connect cancer and racism in America. “Although the mask proliferated, becoming a matter of everyday life, the association between survival of one-self and hatred for an entire people became unnecessarily bound.” In March 2021, would you like to add further comment on Imagine Us, The Swarm and racism?
ML: “The Plural Circuits of Tell” was written before the COVID-19 pandemic, an essay-in-verse that wrestles with cancer, heredity, race, and xenophobia. Before the pandemic, there were multiple occasions in which the spread of an illness became racialized, and it always had to do with nonwhite bodies. I initially wrote about the xenophobia towards East Asians that transpired with the SARS virus, how the image of an Asian person wearing a mask became symbolic of the disease as much as survival from it. I imagine that the current resistance to wearing masks by so many American anti-maskers has to do with this sense of American exceptionalism, that these things are not supposed to happen within the U.S. Yet in so many Asian countries, wearing a mask in public even outside of a pandemic has been fairly standard, a way of protecting oneself in the crowd. That so many Americans could not even envision being inconvenienced in such a small way suggests a grave level of entitlement.
When I revised the piece in August 2020, the pandemic in the U.S. was already underway though the media coverage of violence towards Asian Americans has not had much emphasis. I debated whether the piece needed a revision with COVID-19 in mind (would it be too heavy-handed?), considering so much of the initial content was still relevant. However, with former U.S. President Trump’s refusal to back down from dubbing COVID-19 the “Chinese Virus,” there was this sense of history repeating itself. There is consequence to racializing disease in this way, and so, it is no surprise that there would be an uptick of violence towards Asian Americans, even after Trump’s presidency. Racism has been part of the fabric of the U.S. for so long, and Trump’s language only verified what had long been in existence, offering validation to the white supremacist ideology possessed by so many.
I come back to this interview response today, having woken up to news of a white man who shot several Asian women working in massage parlors in Atlanta, Georgia. Their names are Soon C. Park, Suncha Kim, Yong A. Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, and Hyun J. Grant. While news reports try to evade the relevance of race behind the killer’s motives, his reasoning that he was simply trying to rid himself of his “sex addiction” to Asian women undoubtedly links racism, xenophobia, and misogyny behind his actions. What is so infuriating is that every Asian person in the U.S. can sense that this uptick of anti-Asian violence is connected to the white supremacist ire that Trump had fanned, and now, we bear the consequences. What would justice look like here? Certainly not further investment in the police, not in more surveillance, not in refining definitions of “terrorism” or “hate crime,” which only serves to reify the power of the state. We need a deeper dismantling of white supremacy.
What I hope “The Plural Circuits of Tell” makes clear is that there is a direct correlation between race, language, and disease. Often, I hear racism being compared to a cancer, and this piece is a literalization of how it can most absolutely kill or cause great and prolonged suffering. Having witnessed both parents go through cancer, I had vowed to challenge the internal stigma of illness within myself, knowing that cancer genes live on in future generations. Is that not how the racism and xenophobia of this country lives on too? When I think about the COVID-19 pandemic, I am reminded of that fear that underlies white supremacy, which is also a fear of contagion, and which is devoted to the belief that in order to maintain its power, it must annihilate nonwhite communities, to stop the spread of nonwhite people in the U.S. It refuses to wear a mask. It refuses to believe in a collective agreement of care. It does not see that this change is inevitable, that the pandemic has already arrived, is here. Why are they refusing their vulnerability? What are they so afraid to lose when we are already risking our lives every day?
JL: “There is only our singular pulse as we fill the sky” is a last line of grace and hope. Can you discuss this tension between singularity and plurality (and identity/ownership) throughout the work, and its resolution in the final section?
ML: In the opening essay-in-verse, “This is to live several lives,” I consider what it means “to be at once a colony and alone” after learning that there are some bees that are without colonies. I often feel adrift in this way, struggling to feel at one with various communities, not quite normative enough for my own family. The book takes the reader through a journey of discovery and recovery, of coming to political consciousness, and finding one’s values necessarily challenged. The book’s last section, which features untitled poems clustered under the heading, “When I imagine all the possibilities of the swarm,” is the culmination of this journey, realizing that the only way to create a better future is not alone, as I once thought, but to access some collective spirit. This is a challenge to myself, someone who at times dreams of a perfect community, one that never harms nor ever disappoints. I realize now that some of our most rewarding growth comes from conversations about how communities can transform and heal collective traumas together. The last line is a wish for a moment of unity in which we can agree that we have a devotion to protecting the most vulnerable members of our communities. That takes so much work and deep humbling, but it is what I want for all of us.
Muriel Leung is the author of Imagine Us, The Swarm, forthcoming from Nightboat Books and Bone Confetti, winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award. A Pushcart Prize nominated writer, her writing can be found in The Baffler, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, and others. She is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop and the Community of Writers. She is the Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal. She also co-hosts The Blood-Jet Writing Hour podcast with Rachelle Cruz and MT Vallarta. She is a member of Miresa Collective, a feminist speakers bureau. A Dornsife fellow in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California, she is from Queens, NY.
Julie Jeanell Leung received her MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in a number of publications, including Bellingham Review, Blue Lyra Review, and Grist: The Journal for Writers. Her essays have been selected as a Finalist for Best of the Net and as a winner of the Living Earth Nonfiction Prize. Julie lives with her husband on an island near Seattle where she volunteers as a citizen scientist and counts sea stars on the rocky shores.
She catches glimpses of you every year on this day playing in the sugarcane fields. You are always by yourself. She calls out your name, running in every direction, searching for a brother who has been lost for fifty years. Playing in the sugarcane fields, you are always by yourself, running barefoot in the mud, carrying something in your hand. Dear brother who has been lost for fifty years, she’s spotted you a hundred times wandering barefoot in the mud with a secret in your hand. But she never finds you. She’s spotted you a hundred times— your small shadow in a clearing of cane or in a hint between the stalks. But she never finds you. Still, twins share a mind, and she is certain of your shadow in a small clearing, an inkblot of you between the green stalks. I would burn joss sticks at the altar for you. But she says no, you are still here. Twins share a mind, and she is certain. She calls out for you, searching in every direction. I would burn joss sticks at the family altar. Sister says no. You are in the cane fields. She catches glimpses of you every year.
This selection comes from Wider than the Sky, available from Diode Editions. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.
Nancy Chen Long is the author of Light into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017), winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, as well as the chapbook Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). She is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Her work was selected as the winner of the 2019 Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award and featured in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Indiana Humanities. She works at Indiana University in the Research Technologies division. nancychenlong.com Follow at @NancyChenLong
Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about gender and diversity issues. She’s also the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe and the Non-Fiction Editor of Doubleback Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Selkie Literary Magazine, and Writing Class Radio. She’s currently an MFA Nonfiction candidate at Vermont College of Fine Art and lives in Riverview, Florida.
