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A review by brice_mo
The Sacred Heart Motel by Grace Kwan
3.25
Thanks to NetGalley and Metonymy Press for the ARC!
Personally, I find motels horrifying—the endless, identical rooms, differentiated only by peeling plaster or stained carpet; the way time seems suspended in the scent of stale cigarettes; the pulsing anxiety of inhabiting a space designed to be vacated as quickly as possible.
A good motel is usually one that isn’t memorable; how do you situate a body of work in a place defined by displacement?
This is the challenge that The Sacred Heart Motel—Grace Kwan’s debut collection—faces at every turn, but it is one that seems to animate the poet's work.
In the same way that one might overhear a conversation through a motel wall, these poems feel sustained by a kind of distant ambience. They are fragmented feelings that never quite collage into a clear whole. They are pleasant but often anonymous, not quite clearing the distance between voicelessness and polyvocality.
Periodically, however, a line or poem emerges with such devastatingly unexpected clarity that one almost wishes it were encountered elsewhere. If we’re sticking with the motel metaphor here, it feels like stumbling onto a new favorite movie while flipping through channels on a road trip. The excitement is slightly muted by the thought that you could have seen it on the big screen instead of a room with questionably yellowed sheets.
These moments made me admire the poet’s artistry so much that it felt unimportant when I wasn’t fully on their wavelength with the project’s framing device.
As examples, I think “Rationale,” “My Year of Rest & Expatriation,” and “Song of the Bowstring” are truly incredible poems—the kind that demand an immediate reread through the emotional force of their specificity. I instantly stopped reading to send them to people, and as I read through the rest of the collection, I kept returning to them in my mind.
The motel defied its form to become somewhere I wanted to stay.
The Sacred Heart Motel is thrilling. It's challenging. It's frustrating. Grace Kwan has clearly put a lot of care into this collection, and I’m excited to see how they continue to build on their high-concept approach in future work.
Personally, I find motels horrifying—the endless, identical rooms, differentiated only by peeling plaster or stained carpet; the way time seems suspended in the scent of stale cigarettes; the pulsing anxiety of inhabiting a space designed to be vacated as quickly as possible.
A good motel is usually one that isn’t memorable; how do you situate a body of work in a place defined by displacement?
This is the challenge that The Sacred Heart Motel—Grace Kwan’s debut collection—faces at every turn, but it is one that seems to animate the poet's work.
In the same way that one might overhear a conversation through a motel wall, these poems feel sustained by a kind of distant ambience. They are fragmented feelings that never quite collage into a clear whole. They are pleasant but often anonymous, not quite clearing the distance between voicelessness and polyvocality.
Periodically, however, a line or poem emerges with such devastatingly unexpected clarity that one almost wishes it were encountered elsewhere. If we’re sticking with the motel metaphor here, it feels like stumbling onto a new favorite movie while flipping through channels on a road trip. The excitement is slightly muted by the thought that you could have seen it on the big screen instead of a room with questionably yellowed sheets.
These moments made me admire the poet’s artistry so much that it felt unimportant when I wasn’t fully on their wavelength with the project’s framing device.
As examples, I think “Rationale,” “My Year of Rest & Expatriation,” and “Song of the Bowstring” are truly incredible poems—the kind that demand an immediate reread through the emotional force of their specificity. I instantly stopped reading to send them to people, and as I read through the rest of the collection, I kept returning to them in my mind.
The motel defied its form to become somewhere I wanted to stay.
The Sacred Heart Motel is thrilling. It's challenging. It's frustrating. Grace Kwan has clearly put a lot of care into this collection, and I’m excited to see how they continue to build on their high-concept approach in future work.