Nick Chhoeun : On Learning to Talk

 

 

 

My family history is one of pain. My grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles were all sponsored to come to the US during the Cambodian genocide. We lost many family members. Since then, they have all made sacrifices, so their own children did not have to face pains anything close to theirs; and they succeeded.

My collection of poems in Learning How to Talk shows glimpses of my life from a family with this history. Although I did not experience their past trauma, there is evidence of its existence in my life. I do not feel like I have right to explain their story but instead show my own side to reveal its progression from pain to love. Love is central to these works.

I wrote many of these poems when I decided to take my passion of writing more seriously. The result was poems voicing moments from my childhood to my early twenties.  All of them contain a sense of silence in them regarding “what was said” in relation to “what was actually communicated”. In poems like, “Luxury” and “Pomade as Power”, I include real moments of problematic dialogue. In my poems closely linked to family, like “The Changing of Seasons” and “Family Recipes”, I complicate language barriers. In many ways, the title “Learning How to Talk” is literal. In all these situations, I’m learning how to navigate these conversations that shaped who’ve I become, and it is also a reflection on our current social and political climate. All of us know how to talk and my poems deal with understanding what we are really trying to say.

Khmer, the language of Cambodia, shows up frequently in these poems. I am not well versed in the language. However, my best Khmer involves food. Frequently, food is the catalyst for significant moments in my life. This is a cultural and familial connection. Many poems involve food not primarily as a consumption of hunger but of the soul.

During the publication of Learning How to Talk, my grandfather passed away. In reflecting on his passing, I found that he understood love better than I ever could. What comes after these poems is my further exploration of love through all these complexities. But my clearest definition will always be one of my family. The last poem, “Vows”, is fitting in that the children of our family are continuing the story of our traumatic history and making it a happy one. In honor of the family, we lost and in honor of the family we have, Learning How to Talk continues our story.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nick Chhoeun earned his MFA in Creative Writing from American University. His work explores themes of identity, culture, and love through an Asian American millennial perspective. As a teacher, he shares his passion for writing with his students at Central Connecticut State University and the University of Hartford. He is a Davis Fellow. Aside from his works in writing, you can find him rocking out with his band Not Freshmen. LEARNING HOW TO TALK (above/ground press, 2023) is his chapbook debut.

 

Jérôme Melançon : La femme meurt en juillet, by Mélanie Béliveau

La femme meurt en juillet, Mélanie Béliveau
Éditions Mains Libres, 2022

 

 

 

 

Having had the good fortune of hearing Mélanie Béliveau read several times from her second collection, La femme meurt en juillet (The Woman Dies in July), I wanted to spend more time with the collection as a whole. Béliveau made herself vulnerable by writing about having breast cancer and being treated for it, and presented her vulnerability both as a person and as a physician who was forced to rely on others. As a listener, not yet a reader, I struggled not to hold back, not to hold her voice and the poems at a safe distance – I struggled not to engage in voyeurism. By sitting in a room, quietly, and listening, by sitting with her, by attempting to carry the moment and the months and life it held, I hoped I would be able to welcome these poems. Immediately, I wanted to read the poems by myself, in a different state of vulnerability. Not exposed to others’ gaze and view, not open to the destruction a response can wreak. Knowing that I wouldn’t fully hear or read the poems, I thought I could at least gain something if I sat with nothing but the words and their accumulation, until I could let them create an impression within me, until I could let the collection shift something in me, as the excerpts did. Certainly any book of poetry ought to do this, at least to some extent.

Instead of focusing on cancer, Béliveau writes about her body, her capacity to see it, her relation to it, to herself, to life. She has explained in many interviews that she did not write about cancer, or even about the possibility of death, but about the transformation they brought to her life.

As the site of cancer, and as the object of removal through mastectomy, her breasts take on a variety of meanings. First, literal: “I see death / my breast always on me / I’d like for it to be     elsewhere” (je vois la mort / mon sein tout le temps sur moi / je voudrais qu’il soit     ailleurs, 19). Also sore, or simply nude. And then they are qualified as more or less unreal: a ghost breast; inflatable replicas; one an elite sniper menacing the other; unknown; car rims; RoboCop; vacant; expropriated – and felt up, subject to wandering hands.

The allusions to sex are far from limited to mentions of the breast – indeed, the poems include, but do not describe, unsexy sex, sex where anger and fatigue hover, where a desperate search for life dominates. There’s a desire to be desired, one that is met but unfulfilled at the same time. Sometimes desire is brutally negated:

I passed through the stained glass of your warm neck    in bloom
powdered my desire everywhere
shattered my orgasms, pluralized
you struck your eyes into mine
I set the operating table

j’ai traversé le vitrail de ta nuque chaude     fleurie
poudroyé mon désir partout
fracassé mes orgasmes au pluriel
tu t’es acharné sur mes yeux
j’ai mis la table d’opération (20)

In this poem, we see the percussive effect of the writing, which at once carries anger and holds it back; we see the immense metaphors that allude to all that is unreachable, unattainable. The violence rises from passing through, to powdering or dusting, shattering (but say: fra-ca-sser, feel how hard it feels in your mouth), and finally striking (but think: s’acharner, striking over and over, getting into the flesh, chair). This crescendo takes what might be lovely moment of eyes locking into eyes during sex into a refusal to look at anything but the eyes: a moment of shared desperation and impossible proximity. La femme meurt en juillet is full of moments like this, full of the tragedy of uncertain transformations and (self-)destruction (and here I use tragedy in the strong sense of a force which cannot be controlled and dooms those who suffer from its action, not something that is merely incredibly sad). A few pages further, the hope of abandon through sex meets the reality of pain. Without pointing to a divide in the couple, Béliveau shows the conflict between sexual desire and the need for comfort and a different kind of intimacy, both within herself and between her and her partner: “love or sex / the sign can’t be read from here” (amour ou sexe / la pancarte n’est pas lisible d’ici, 84).

A deepening anger underlies most of the poems, beginning with memories of childhood and adolescence which rather than being moments of innocence, have become moments of not-yet knowing. Béliveau can no longer access these memories without going through the shock she is still experiencing, and which has displaced what she might have learned since her youth:

in my pocket a shard of broken glass
fixes everythings       at fifteen years old

at forty you receive a blow to the face
you no longer know anything
and golden cemeteries await us

dans ma poche un bout de verre brisé
ça règle tout     à quinze ans

à quarante on reçoit un coup au visage
on ne connaît plus rien
et les cimetières dorés nous attendent (14)

Yet there are limits to this anger. The lack of titles and strong statements, together with the short lines that make up poems that are themselves relatively brief, all point to fatigue. Expressing anger then appears as a choice, as is letting exhaustion orient her response. In the “Three months post-op” section, anger seems to dominate: “the world could go right to hell” (le monde pourrait aller chier comme il faut, 68); “I lost my empathy / at the corner of King street and 13th avenue” (j’ai perdu mon empathie / au coin de la rue King et de la 13e avenue, 69). But anger is never the sole emotion: this seventh section ends with fear and the feeling that something remains hidden – and Béliveau struggles with the scarves she must wear and which appear in a sequence of poems as an obstructing extension of her being.

The titles of the last two sections play on the meanings of leave – to take leave of cancer, to be on leave from work. The emptiness of the post-cancer period is surrounded, cushioned, by the realization that life remains possible, one which Béliveau makes less and less futile efforts to seize. She learns to see herself anew through someone else’s eyes – the one who loves her, who continues to desire her, but also her “amazon,” another person who underwent a double mastectomy but chose to go without implants.

Together they learn to see themselves through one another: “our seams we showed / one another and me” (on s’est montré nos coutures / l’une et l’autre et moi, 70); “our scars we unveiled / told a story” (on s’est dévoilé nos cicatrices / raconté une histoire, 71). Only once the transformation is complete can Béliveau see herself without needing someone else’s gaze as mediation:

I was able to look at myself without your eyes
a hundred and ten bandages     a hundred drains
before me a creature that was not being born
this time    it will have taken more than forceps
curled up clammy trembling
she was strong   yelled at passersby

j’ai été capable de me regarder sans tes yeux
cent dix pansements      cent drains
devant moi une créature qui ne naissait pas
cette fois     ça aura pris plus que des forceps
recroquevillée moite tremblante
elle était forte     criait aux passants (99)

Comparisons of herself to a scavenger give way to metaphors of her and her partner as “benevolant predators / friends to the great cold / each at their window     against absence / drawing great things / captive birds” (de bienveillants prédateurs / amis des grands froids / chacun à sa fenêtre     contre l’absence / dessinant de grandes choses / oiseaux captifs, 84). In the very last section, analogical thinking seems less necessary, as Béliveau writes more directly about clear results from follow-up appointments and a new proximity to her partner. Pain remains, even though “nothing can prevent the we any longer” (plus rien ne peut empêcher le nous, 103).

Writing a book, of course, allows for another view altogether, far from those of those who people her life. Coming Béliveau, who now sees herself as a poet who practises medicine, a mention of the Québécoise poet Marie Uguay, despite its sobriety, marks the shadow that disease and death cast upon poetry. Uguay’s work remains on the whole to be translated (but see three poems in periodicities and the selected poems published by Guernica), but she is known among readers of poetry in Québec to have died of cancer at the age of 26, at the beginning of an already fruitful life of writing – while Béliveau, not that far later in life, was being treated for cancer around the time when she published what was only her first collection.

In spite of this explicit comparison, Béliveau only addresses the act of writing in her poems at the very end, as a way to acknowledge what she does to those she loves as she emerges from the anger, fear, and fatigue of the treatment. Writing seems to come after the fact, not as document but as yet another movement through the transformation, a way to complete it, to make herself visible not only to those she trusts, to herself, but to the world – irrevocably putting herself into the world. “I must write my being brought into the world” she concludes, “red like July” (je dois écrire ma mise au monde / rouge comme juillet, 105). These last words echo the line that gives the collection its title where she becomes a third person to herself. Here, like in the rest of the collection, she alternates between the direct and obvious, and the highly abstract and metaphorical. But in the writing, as opposed to the experience of cancer and the transformations it initiates, nothing is cloaked.

 

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His most recent chapbook is with above/ground press, Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022, after 2020’s Coup), and his most recent poetry collection is En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on Twitter mostly, and sometimes on Instagram, both at @lethejerome.

Ethan Vilu : Cradle and Spoon, by Kate Spencer

Cradle and Spoon, Kate Spencer
Minor Works of Death Press, 2022

Across all of the intimate and intense terrain that is covered in her debut collection, Kate Spencer consistently displays both profound thoughtfulness and an admirable sense of intention. The first publication from the exciting new press Minor Works of Death, Cradle and Spoon is the product of a rigorous meditation on the nature and capacities of poetry. This is not speculation on my part; in an appended essay, Spencer makes explicit many of the key premises which informed the book’s creation, and grounds her approach concretely within the history of the medium. As both a jaggedly honest display of emotion and an exposition of a particular approach to poetic writing, Cradle and Spoon is a fascinating work, worthy of one’s careful attention.

As a collection of poetry, Spencer’s debut covers many of the most difficult and ineliminable parts of the human experience, including parent-child relationships, substance use, self-expression and repression, love, and mourning. In particular, Spencer asserts her own specifically feminine relation to all of these facets of life, and takes care to articulate the gendered nuances of her experience through the confessional mode. The poet’s focus is turned intently upon the humanity of herself and others; this leads to some admirably wry portrayals of those who would misapprehend another person out of misogyny or general insecurity. In “A Letter to Ted,” one of my favorite poems in the collection, Spencer writes of the late Ted Hughes:

Work to forget a maiden name,

two anniversaries, and the amount
you owe women you’ve made
into ghosts, and ghosts into poetry–

another masterpiece.

Stylistically Spencer’s work is incredibly versatile, containing a variety of free verse approaches as well as madrigals, villanelles, haikus, glosas, and variations on the sonnet form. One frequently encounters startling, remarkable images, often delivered across multiple lines - I could point to “Without sleep, I hear the familiar, low drone of silence / sneak in under the crack of the door, dying to erupt / into the madness of another week.” from “The Winter After Frank’s Death” as an example. Many pieces in the collection are tightly wound with irregular rhymes and sonic play, and a large number employ some form of repetition, whether it be of a single word (e.g. “silver” in “Inheritability”) or a deliberately imperfect repeating of the entire contents of a piece (as in “Sleepwalk Palindrome”). The use of these poetic devices is frequently supremely effective, as in “Thin-skin vanity, my tougher tongue split / tight circles of details–sweat that inherits / all of the living.” from “A New Madrigal for an Old Coven or Beatitudes for the Vain”. I did struggle at times with what seemed like an almost relentless quality in some of the poems - the cascading alliterations and internal rhymes would briefly become overbearing, as in “The ache wakes her again, / reaching for blindness, she / sews new scabs each morning / to skew familial likeness.” from “The Creation Myth (or Postpartum)”. Additionally, the poet’s occasional use of fairly graceless end rhymes divorced from consistent metre (as in “Something Like Grace Kelly” and “Her Loose Dress”) struck me as a pronounced weak point in the text. Although these are mostly minor concerns, I did at times wonder if a given poem’s subject would have been better served by a greater degree of stylistic subtlety.

There were a few moments in Cradle and Spoon which presented me with challenges, but this is entirely commensurate with the level of rigour and attention which Spencer brings to her writing practice. This is a book which interrogates poetry as a medium, and which is committed to exploring the genre’s contours and boundaries; it is not contentious to say that not every instance of such exploration will appear successful to all readers. What cannot be denied is that Cradle and Spoon is a tremendously enjoyable book, and a worthwhile read for anyone who is passionate about poetry. Spencer’s thoroughgoing commitment to the medium, encompassing all of its ambiguities and peculiarities, is a quality to which all of us should aspire. 

 

 

 

 

 

Ethan Vilu (they/she) is a poet and editor from Calgary, Alberta. Their longsheet A Decision Re: Zurich was published by The Blasted Tree in 2020, and their poems and reviews have been featured in a variety of outlets. Ethan currently serves as both poetry editor and circulation manager for filling Station Magazine. She dearly hopes to one day play the Marine Park golf course in Brooklyn, and she can be found on twitter at @CNNSwitzerland.

Ivy Johnson : Lessons From Brenda (for Brenda Iijima

from Report from the Iijima Society, Vol. 1 No. 1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ivy Johnson is the author of As They Fall (Timeless Infinite Light, 2013), The Third Thing (coauthored with Kate Robinson, Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2016), Born Again (The Operating System, 2018), and Precious Moments (Sky Trail Press, 2019).

To read / watch some of her work, go to https://linktr.ee/Ivy_Johnson.