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nostalgicplant's review
adventurous
challenging
5.0
Gorgeous collection of poetry. Honestly really beautiful.
A few favs
A few favs
- Bardo Baby
- "...a part of my heart is dead and this hurts me / I conjure a colorless sky and this calms me until I look out the window / where a blue curtain hans spherical from the firmament / Why am I still scared of demons and loud noises, of my reflection in the mirror? / Why am I every age at once, each part of my body frozen in a different time?"
- "Does something remain ill-fated if it has already met its fate? / Does the sickness abandon course or does it live on like a phantom limb, atmospheric, / like a cirus on a ghost ship where immortality is less a paradise than a human zoo / Again I wake up as if there were no possibility of dying"
- Ohne Titel
- "Freud liked how cocaine made him feel, how it opened the floodgates of the mind, letting the locked thoughts spill out like the light from a lba of synthetic diamonds. Have you ever read Freud on cocaine? Have you ever felt epically nauseated by the spell of oxygen in this world? Have you ever dreamed something so profane that it could only have come from you own mind? In my dreams, people die."
- "Giada's Stomach: I arrive at my massage appointment is a peach-colored suburban tract home of the sort that popped up in droves in the late nineties in California. The masseuse is late. I wait and wait and end up falling asleep overnight in an empty room. In the morning I begin to feel lonely."
- Feral Spice
- "My analyst asks when I fired noticed the pattern. / What pattern? I ask, before I realize that he means my pattern of misfortune. / How nice of him. I'd always called it fate."
- Problem
- gorgeous poem about life and beauty and the killing of the self. also Hume (connection necessitates a relation of causation dude) makes an appearance, which is wild.
- Diptych
- "If by love to travel you mean the bourgeois ache for life beyond the nine-to-five of Outlook and Excel and if by travel, which I take to mean the Allbirds-padded trek of routes sophomoric and reviewed on Yelp, then yes, I understand the provenance of your soul's ambition for commission trophies lest your empty shelves remind you of the holes that dot like lace your hitherto embrace of life and love and laughter for the likes, your beignets topped with foie, a demi-glace of middle-class aspartame which strikes eventually the brain: the fate of fake enrichment, cloud of photos at your grave."
- Ceremony
- "I reentered instead into a scene whose great distance from my adulthood I give daily thanks for but which I was, at the time, condemned to for eternity."
- "I took three smalls steps in the direction of the North Star before resigning to my seast, where I pressed an imaginary finger to my prefrontal cortex and rubbed furiously in small circles to the thought of running away until I achieved orgasm in front of everyone I hated, the burst brilliant and adamantine as diamonds. Once a spiritualism whom I met on a dating site told me that one orgasm on the astral plane is equivalent to ten thousand orgasms on Earth occurring simultaneously in every cell of your body. How could I believe him? How could I not?"
- Perfect
- this poem answers the essential question: what if I made a sexy math poem about losing a love?
- Blindness Pattern
- AGAIN WITH THE HOT MATH EQUATIONS
- it's a beautiful, long poem about the process of forgetting, told through vignettes with resetting numbers. it warns you from the beginning, "1. There is a mathematical formula which plots the erosion of memory over time, where Retrievability is Euler's number to the negative power of Time over the Stability of Memory. They call this the Forgetting Curve. 2. What this means is that memory fades." but you are unprepared for the amount of striking imagery, pain, and beauty in the words.
- Other lines are so original I can't help but wish my mind thought the way the author's does. I think I would be better for it. "2. Darkness is the balm, which softens the world's hard edges. Out the window, our stalks of amaranth shot up like jeweled bullets. 3. There is a name for the color seen by the mind's eye in perfect darkness, that off-black of an almost-absence. They call this Eigengrau: 3.1 An austere life of hard rules and dry complexions set to minimal techno and a strict schedule of sandwiches on hard, dry breads. 3.2 He said this was his favorite color. I said, You're a pretentious fuck."
- And on womanhood: "I'd wanted something more -- something esoteric, something pagan. Looking back, I wanted something magical."
- Poetics
- It starts with a line about Aristotle and it just slaps from there on.
- Fragment of a Vessel
- "It was summer. We were young, or at least I said I was, thought I wasn't, and hadn't been for years. I thought / I wanted someone young, a new love yo breathe into me another chance at living. I wanted to feel. I wanted more time."
- "That night, I recited to a roomful of strangers a poem about a younger me, an older heartbreak from a time when having a job still seemed like fun."
- then there's a good bit about art history and the history of the real art piece
- Dungeon Master
- RHYME. MOTHERFUCKING. SCHEME.
- EVERYONE CLAP PLEASE.
- Starts with "I've lived not one life but many more. I've wanted to leave, to exit this world..."
- And did I mention the end of every stanza. Is the beginning of the nEXT STANZA in a way that teases and frames it so well...
- would make a really wonderful prose piece tbh.
- a gorgeous piece on modern history
julieannholland's review against another edition
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
4.0
reads2cope's review against another edition
4.0
Scary when a book like this has so many overlaps in my own life.
magenta_menace's review
4.0
thanks to netgalley for a free arc of this title! i really enjoyed chung's opulent, intellectual poetics and this collection makes you think as well as feel. her language blends the timeless with the incredibly timely, pop culture references and psychoanalytic thought abound. discussion of culture, sex, racial origin, and growing up make this a rich, diverse collection. some segments were a bit heady and dense, which i personally really enjoyed but it may be a bit isolating for casual readers. i look forward to seeing more of this poet's work!
imiji's review
adventurous
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
this is a really playful and limber and perceptive poetry collection that i'm having trouble even articulating why i liked. particular highlights included the 15-sonnet crown "dungeon master," "the day you left, i remembered," "ordinary pain," and "blindness pattern." i hope this book finds its readers because unexpectedly it found one in me!!