Baby Book, Amy Ching-Yan Lam
Brick Books, 2023
She writes of belief, and how such beliefs, such as with any other story, can be turned, confused and reworked, whether deliberately or across time, as well as how such stories can shift beyond the borders between cultures. “This week I am learning about the truth of expression.” she writes, as part of the sequence “ENGLISH ACCENT,” “My teacher says that if you smile, even when you are feeling sad, / you can still receive some of the benefits of being happy. / Even if you are simply smiling while sad. / He says that shame is similarly a physiological reaction. / It exists in your body and you can get rid of it with a physical / action.”
I hesitate to call these pieces prose poems, although they are poems structured in a form of narrative prose; her extended sequences exist from the bones and flesh of the narrative sentence, many of which collude to form prose blocks, but not always, and not necessarily. It is through the order she places her sentences that provide her narratives their power. As the six-page extended piece “ENGLISH ACCENT,” a poem that moves through navigating a series of narratives foreign to one’s own, ends:
Decades of no apologies or fake ones.
Decades of art about war.
Art that is fluent, rhetorically successful.
A beautiful carved wooden box.
That which blocks the truth is physical.
It’s a hot, stuck feeling in the body.
It’s a heavy heat. It’s a heavy box.
The physical remains physical.
The physical can be moved.
The physical can be destroyed.
When destroyed, it doesn’t disappear.
But it can be moved.
There is something curious as to how this book-length exploration on the connections and disconnections of family and family stories echo further other titles that Brick has produced since the publisher/editorial shift a few years back, a particular thread of titles that would include Andrea Actis’ Grey All Over (2021), David Bradford’s Griffin Prize-shortlisted Dream of No One but Myself (2021) and Nanci Lee’s Hsin (2022). Each of these, in their own way, as well, offer book-length explorations through new and unusual structures, allowing the shapes of the poems to provide startlingly fresh perspectives on the otherwise-familiar complications of family, cultural collisions and the disappearance of stories. Offering a tale of her grandmother and the slow release of family stories through “WE PRAY BEFORE DINNER,” Ching-Yan Lam writes:
I know why you’re
asking me so many questions.
Why?! I said.
She said, Because
you want to make a movie of my life!
Oh, I said.
Other facts have
been told to me in the same way.
The other day in
Chinatown:
A woman with white
hair, in soft flowered pants, let out a big
loud sigh.
She leaned herself
against a fire hydrant.
She lowered her
plastic shopping bags to the ground.
She said, Aiya, so
painful!
I went over and
asked if she needed help.
She said, No, it’s
OK, I’d rather walk.
She said, Do you
know what the doctor told me?
The doctor said the only option is to chop the leg right off. Yes,
that’s what the
Western doctor said. And my daughter told me,
If you chop it off
I’m not going to push your wheelchair for you.
I said, Oh my god.
Your daughter said
that?! I asked.
She said, Yes.
this is the way human life is.
Then our conversation
ended.
