The Undressing: Poems by Li-Young Lee (W. W. Norton & Company, 2018)
★★★★☆
Of Li-Young Lee’s work, I knew only “Persimmons” and “Spoken For,” but I knew I liked them, enough to consider making the latter an epigraph in my novel. When David pointed out this collection in the bookstore, I paged through the titular poem and immediately bought the whole thing on a whim.
“The Undressing” is a long poem. The first of several acts compares the person we are by ourselves to the person we are with company or a lover; it celebrates when “the word we give” and “the word we keep” are the same. It made me feel grateful to be in a relationship where my tatemae is my honne. An especially dexterous passage here considers the power—and limits—of said words, recalling Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas” (“a word is elegy to what it signifies”):
A word has many lives.
Quarry, the word is game, unpronounceable.
Pursuant, the word is judge, pronouncing sentence.
Affliction, the word is a thorn, chastising.(…)
The initiating word
embarks, fixed between sighted wings, and
said, says, saying, none are the bird,
each just moments of the flying.
I love the imagery Lee uses to honor the act of giving voice to love: indefatigable geology pirouetting into coruscant airy hope.
The lovers’ voices
and the voices of the beloved
are the ocean’s legion scaling earth’s black bell,
their bright crested foam
the rudimentary beginnings
of bridges and wings, the dream of flying,
and the yearning to cross over.
I did struggle a bit with the setting of the poem: a male speaker literally undresses a female speaker as she makes these remarks. I found the sexual framing more distracting than off-putting, but as another Goodreads reviewer points out, it invites a problematic dynamic. After sitting with this poem for a few days, I’m still not sure how I feel about that.
But I suspect the constant interruption, at least, is intentional. In the next act, the female speaker admonishes the male speaker for his lust:
True lovers know, she says,
hunger vacant of love is a confusion,
spoiling and squandering
such fruit love’s presence wins.The harvest proves the vine
and the hearts of the ones who tend it.Everything else is gossip, guessing
at love’s taste.
I understand this rephrasing of “the grass is greener where you water it” to be Lee’s motive, and interpret Lee to be critical of the male speaker’s distraction by worldly pleasure (similar to the speaker in “Persimmons”). This criticism extends to the reader as well: having made his case for the importance of love (“Nothing saves him who’s never loved. / No world is safe in that one’s keeping”), Lee ramps up the urgency of his treatise, demanding we find commonality not just with lovers, but with “other travelers,” “figures in a dream of refuge,” “the voiceless.” This act involves religious metaphor, most of which admittedly remains mysterious to me, but culminates in the commandment to “by God, sing!” Some of the most delicious avian imagery in the collection (there’s a lot) resides here:
The hours you sing return to you in true scale and degree.
The hours you measure by singing return winged
and noted, throated, eyed, and whirring-hearted.
Return red-crested, blue-feathered, black-frocked,
striped, spotted, flecked, and fine-boned.
But “The Undressing” isn’t just treatise: it’s catalyst. Lee’s closing passages are not subtle, referencing not just the U.S. under 45 but thousands of years of the human will to violence, and repeatedly echoing the female speaker’s question: “Are you listening?” It’s as direct a call-to-action as I’ve ever seen in this medium, and reminds me of N. K. Jemisin’s comments on the unsubtle approach in SFF:
You cannot trust your audience to just figure that ish out. Some of them will, because they've lived it or learned better. Many will not, because they have been trained, by life and by fiction, to see only the "polite" obscuration, and to regard realism as separate and vulgar.
— N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) March 13, 2019
Though I found the remaining poems in the collection to be generally lyrical and emotional, few touched me to the same extent as “The Undressing.” There are additional celebrations of love, song, and word (including “Spoken For”); meditations on family, survival, and belonging—drawing deeply from Lee’s and his family’s (pre)histories as refugees; and profound but often very metaphysical intersections of the two.
But I can’t recommend the titular poem enough: it’s a tour de force, a reminder to hold on and hold dear, and more than worth the price of the volume.
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Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf Publishing Group, 2017)
★★★★☆
A short read, but a useful one. Adichie’s suggestions touch on many different aspects of feminism and what it means to be a woman and mother today. The lack of jargon is refreshing, as is her approachable tone. I did wish, however, that the author would acknowledge nonbinary or gender-nonconforming identities.
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Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman (Atlantic Books, 2017)
★★★☆☆
This book succeeds in capturing the experience of “infatuation.” Though I found it hard to relate to the intellectuality that underpins much of Elio’s connection with Oliver, the former’s fretting and obsessing and double-guessing felt real, like something a true seventeen-year-old would do. (The film reduces this inner dialogue to a series of significant glances that I found harder to parse and thus less believable.)
I don’t buy that it captures “first love” equally well. I wanted more visibility into how Elio and Oliver interacted with each other. I found little evidence their relationship was more than a product of proximity and languid days—too little to merit present-day-Elio’s awestruck tone (not to mention his coming undone when they reunite). And Oliver is so meager a presence on the page, it’s hard to believe he reciprocates these deeper feelings. Even their nights in Rome—which I loved, for how vivid and ambling and trivial they were—could arguably be reduced to a travel hookup.
Perhaps Aciman is just being oblique, or perhaps he means us to understand their shared shame is so great a vulnerability that overcoming it establishes a soul-bond. I wanted more. In this regard, though, the film’s closing scene is transcendent: parting after an infatuation can be as cutting as losing a deep love; it’s ambiguous which Elio feels, but we feel right along with him.
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The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi (Wednesday Books, 2019)
★★☆☆☆
On the one hand, this book contains some lovely turns of phrase, and the occasional glittering prose. On the other hand, I have no idea what happened?
The Gilded Wolves is Chokshi's attempt to peel back the veneer on the Exposition Universelle, the world's fair that was held in Paris in 1889. "As a Filipina and Indian woman," she writes, "colonialism runs in my veins. I couldn’t reconcile the horrors of that era with the glamour of it." I commend her for bringing that lens to this event, and appreciate the research that went into this book.
But the fictional parts? The Horus Eyes and Babel Fragments were completely abstract MacGuffins to me. The climactic action sequence was too abstruse and juddering to follow, with a disappointingly cardboard villain.
Even the main characters, though fun, lacked presence. They're essentially all thieves pulling off a series of progressively more complex heists... so why are they so incompetent? It was frustrating to read about these teammates being each other's weakest links or failing to notice when things were slightly off. It's like, come on, this is a world where almost anything can be magically enchanted and kill you. (The sheer scope of Forging made it pretty difficult to feel invested in any of the heist-related drama—characters frequently had just-the-right-item to get them out of trouble.)
Expecting this to be strict fantasy, I didn't expect there to be so much romance on the page. Not a problem, but the leader of the group is a brooding male who doesn't know how to express his feelings... yawn. I did find the Enrique and Hypnos/Zofia triangle more interesting.
Laila being a “crafted girl” was a neat idea, but such people openly existing (?) seemed like it should have had more societal ramifications. Along the same lines, the security systems incorporating verit stone (to detect weapons) and eye tests (to detect mind control) were reasonable concepts, but seemed insufficient given how volatile so many other Forged items were. Finally, I'm shocked the team worked together for so long without anyone learning about Laila's mysterious powers through either trust or accident.
Thanks for the recommendation, PJ, but this one was a trainwreck.