like shining from shook foil
- A Review by Dante Di Stefano
- Sep 4, 2015
- 3 min read
Yearling
By Lo Kwa Mei-en
Lo Kwa Mei-en’s debut collection, Yearling, is gorgeous in its angers. Drop dead. Through a series of persona poems and brief lyrics, Mei-en mythologizes an emotional landscape in tumult and charts a process of self-definition confounded by, and yet contingent upon, language; This is how the yearling finds its stride, how the adolescent fumbles toward maturity, riled by the incandescent nettles hidden in an interior monologue. Mei-en employs lavishly ornate, and yet finely calibrated, diction—what Wallace Stevens would have approvingly labeled as “gaudy.” This essential gaudiness textures the poems and renders them tectonic, barbed, and achingly alive. You don’t so much read Yearling as you do feel it in your knuckles. The dense music of these poems vibrates in the marrow of your radius and ulna bones. In this music, Mei-en explores how desire might animate a worldview, or, in her own words, how “the germ bucks up through the black…in the frantic/ husk of the feeling body.” A poem appropriately called “Ariel” initiates the book’s tempestuous exploration of how a feeling body might map its powerful emotions onto language. The poem begins: “Temper, temper. More/ of it: leather-lashed/ to its own prow.” These are daring lines in their initial use of colloquialism and in their compact sprung rhythms. The poem ends: “I dreamt like a war machine/ and woke like a child.” Throughout the collection, Mei-en luxuriates in vicissitude as an organizing principle. In the “Pinnochia” poems and in the “Era” poems that thread throughout the book, the speaker vacillates between ferocity and naiveté, navigating “a land of mythic passage, where want comes/ to pass as real.” In “Pinnochia from Pleasure Island,” the speaker explains: “…My body’s a dress (cut from a fond hell I tore/ off the tongue of the real), a first name for what’s beneath.” For Mei-en, language both incarnates and eviscerates. The bodily merely garments the world of feeling we truly inhabit. Dwelling, as the poems in this collection do, in the world of feeling, Mei-en constantly invites her readers, as she does in “Era for Forgiveness,” to “know me harder.” To know her harder is to know the rough husbandry of the human, to know the body as an empty cup, to know whole eras of drowning and recovery, to know near extinction rising into psalm, to know abandon and addiction and the elegy inside a banyan tree, to know a poem the size of a wing, and to discover, finally, “a red illumination to light the animal amen.” Yearling is a book pocked with the tiny apocalypses of consciousness that constitute growth in any coming of age story. This book distinguishes itself with its precise, brutal, and exquisite technique; each poem is an arrow, piercing into the ecstatic. The ecstasy of influence figures prominently in Yearling. Mei-en clearly acknowledges her debt both to Emily Dickinson and to Gerard Manley Hopkins throughout this collection. In these poems, Mei-en hefts her life like a loaded gun and it flames out like shining from shook foil.
Dante Di Stefano's poetry and essays have appeared recently in The Writer's Chronicle, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, Shenandoah, Brilliant Corners, The Southern California Review, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, The Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, The Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry, The Bea Gonzalez Prize in Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize. He works as a high school English teacher in Endicott, New York.
For more work by Dante Di Stefano, check out his page at our Online Sundries site.
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