A review by rosepoints
Beast at Every Threshold by Natalie Wee

5.0

this was one of my most favorite books, if not THE favorite, of 2023. even though it’s a collection of poems, wee has a way of slicing right through you with her selection of words. in “beast at every threshold,” wee dances between familial hauntings and cultural histories as well as more intimate hungers and broader griefs. her poetry deals with the intersections of queerness, diaspora and loss, situating the body as a site of violence for both good and bad.  

more specifically, she makes that queerness visceral and tangible with her sharp poetry. for example, the poem, “skin hunger, with waves”, has a line that says, “but your sharp kiss was a promise / i failed because the body is a question / only touch can answer.” the poet shies away from the intimacy of queer love and the idea of embracing but they are drawn right back to it because they are hungry for something good of their own. there’s another poem called “asami writes to korra for three years” where wee writes, “your daily return to the knifepoint of a burning city, planting loyal bones in the earth to beg for those faces the soil mothers.” like! wow!

as for diaspora, one poem i loved dearly was the poem, “can you speak english?” wee writes, “haunting, the border agent called me, instead of huan ting. a single exhale dislocating phantom from girl.” in that same poem, wee also writes, “how a mother tongue becomes that which she guards alone…& now i wear my mother’s skull, sour the native tongue with seethe. you, haunting. where are you from?”

you get it, i love this poetry book with a passion. i will leave you with one last quote from the poem, “in defense of my roommate’s dog.”

“once, i lost myself & found an instrument of forgetting, let someone’s lover fashion from the ocean of my solitude a shoreline for their sins to wash up on… maybe the trade-off for resurrection is shame vast enough to kill us & that becomes another execution to tongue our way out of.”