Consider the fish being "dressed" as a mythical creature, and a metaphor for migration. How does a salmon travel? What if a salmon were to travel through a dream, or you knew the salmon had traveled through your dreams, and then you had purchased salmon at the grocery store. And this disjunction was how you discovered your identity. Because this is how sense and discovery are built into Chabitnoy's book. Like a dream. But, in this case, the contents of the dream exist in an archive. Her ancestor, Michael Chabitnoy, really existed. She can find his name among documents, but he's not fully documented. Kind of like how a dream still exists in a person's memory. But the full recall of the dream feels impossible.
I am fascinated with Chabitnoy's docupoetics that is both fact and mere gesture toward fact. Where the documentation proves Michael Chabitnoy existed, but leaves so much unresolved about that existence. Which is kind of the realm of myth. Or at least the spirit of mythos. A vague figure from the past whose narrative is filled in and elaborated on, because without him, the poet would not have existed. And it’s how Chabitnoy can mix together the myth around journey, the discovery of family, the myth around self, the documentation of self, the dream of a self who had arrived in the continental United States, and what is this myth supposed to look like?
The book is so moving. Where sometimes it seems to exist in a dream. And sometimes it's a long deliberation. How is it someone finds their way into a heritage? How do they reconcile a multi-racial identity? I suppose mythos provides an expansive enough frame to encompass all these variables.
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.