Reviews - October 2020

'Collective poesy'

The disruptive pleasures of Caroline Bergvall's 'Alisoun Sings'

Photo by Helena Wikström, courtesy of Caroline Bergvall, 'Drift Umeå,' NorrlandsOperan, Sweden.

During an interview from the afterlife, Jack Spicer tells Hoa Nguyen that in making a poem, “you start with a syllable machine and see what ghosts you catch.” Similarly, Bergvall’s Alisoun Sings channels a polyphonous “voice-cluster” of pop stars and feminist icons of art and literature. Bergvall and Alisoun form a “collective poesy” (104) through queer networks of affiliation to explore pleasure’s physical and linguistic role in disbanding the national ties that constrain us.

During an interview from the afterlife, Jack Spicer tells Hoa Nguyen that in making a poem, “you start with a syllable machine and see what ghosts you catch.” Similarly spirited, Caroline Bergvall’s Alisoun Sings channels a polyphonous “voice-cluster”[1] of pop stars and feminist icons of art and literature, all centered around Alisoun, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath.

Translating in mirrors

Photo of Don Mee Choi ©Photographer SONG Got, courtesy of Don Mee Choi.
Photo of Don Mee Choi ©Photographer SONG Got, courtesy of Don Mee Choi.

The title of Don Mee Choi’s new pamphlet, Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-neocolonial mode, contains a “=” mark, a symbol that is not written language and yet conveys a recognizable meaning. The equal sign establishes equivalency: the “=” holds a mirror to the first clause, showing a second clause that’s not an exact replica, yet is in some ways a reflection. The “=” achieves what Choi approaches in her pamphlet: translation as a twinning language. As Choi writes on the first page of her pamphlet, “I come from such twoness.

The carceral outside

A review of 'The Desert' by Brandon Shimoda

Photo of the Sonora Desert Museum in Tuscon, AZ, by Michelle Maria, via Wikimedia Commons.

I thought of these mythic depictions of the American West as I read Brandon Shimoda’s The Desertnot because Shimoda repeats their clichés but rather because his book so powerfully unearths the violence and oppression they obscure. Shimoda reveals another American desert, one that has, of course, been there all along (or at least since Europeans arrived on the scene). It is the shadow side of the myths of freedom, emptiness, and speed. 

We don’t often think of deserts as confining. In the Western imaginary, at least, the mystique of the desert is that of unboundedness, escape, freedom, and authenticity. The American desert — in this sense more a generic placeholder than a specific geography — has served as a backdrop for the continual staging of these cultural myths.