Hsiung’s opening signals an extreme ambition. Like this is going to be about reading, not speaking, and the reader should be made aware of the difference.
This writing had nothing to do with speech. We see how our view of evolution depends on our view of written language, a, evolving from proto-writing, the, based on hieroglyph, something between topographic gesture and orthographic representation, the warmonger is no more, a warmonger has been born, into the writing we think of today, but this would take into account English and English’s siblings only. (13-14)
Within the very particular focus on article (indefinite versus definite), and how Hsiung will later on trace the lineage of English back, so that “proto-writing” would be making one kind of statement (how it continues to exist in English) and “hieroglyph” another. And even getting into conceptual work that language might occupy (as indicated with the “topography”) and the details (in “orthography,” which is about spelling) and how that might influence things.
Because the fact this book is written helps to limit the vectors among the book’s effort to build a variety of vectors, and, I think, to show how this would complicate and address many different contemporary issues. That idea that we are in the middle of many cultural moments, and our “reading” of those moments are imperfectly formed when we are only focusing on a specific field’s grasp of knowledge. Hsiung, for instance, addresses many issues. Being among a group of friends who can only ever partially understand you and misunderstand the signals you’re giving. How being a woman in the contemporary culture would be so different from the lives women historically lived. And yet the difference between these two still doesn’t exclude how women are currently treated. How urban living could undermine people’s health. And this could be connected to climate change. There is a chaos of vectors, and an eagerness when discovering a new vector, and then the conflicts new vectors pose to other vectors. How is someone supposed to tell the story of a life? What destiny is proposed by family and background, and to what degree is a valence laid upon all possible future vectors by your family’s background.
The social of this book is so fascinating to me, because it’s accounting for family, for the fate dictated by demographics, for friends and how these complicated backgrounds continue to play out within that. It’s like Hsiung senses there’s some secret at the base of her existence, and she’s going to spend her life trying to discover it, while also fearing that all the people in her life already know the secret. And her anticipation of them knowing along with her own large desire to know is what pressures the analogies to collapse before they can even begin. The analogies which would seem to provide some insight into her biography, that would wrangle a new vector into something understandable, but which then collapse under the weight of so much thinking.
And yet those anchors persist. In many of the poems, there are gestures to some unifying principle. A love letter. A Steinian chronicle of working. A “black box.” Couplets about dust. In many ways, the book proposes consistency in some form, a mantra in some cases, a common reference. But, as though every repeated idea or word begins to reveal it contains a secret within it, the poem breaks down while that insider secret proves impenetrable to language that keep breaking down in chaos.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.