Zhang’s book feels like family, being trapped in family. Or being trapped in that moment when you’re getting shit off your chest, maybe about family, maybe about someone named Michael, who seems like the kind of person that lays shit on your chest, then stands there to watch what you’re going to say about it. Thanks for the poetic occasion, “Michael.” Whatever that shitty feeling is, and then the feeling you get when you think writing something down will help get it off your chest. And it does a little bit. But that’s only because you distracted yourself from feeling shitty for the 30 seconds it took you to get to the end of writing that.
Think of a country that was crowded in with sentences, and a poet appeared in that country to remove the periods and make space for where she thought she might insert commas. That’s what a family is. That’s what relationships are. That’s what a friend group is before there were group chats, and you were on the out’s harvesting commas. Take some scissors to the novels of Henry James and harvest you some commas. And let Affect Theory course through you, like you were reading the Bible, the parts where things feel like they’re getting ready to boil over. The truth is God was inserting curse words into people’s souls and removing the punctuation. Zhang’s book is the Affect I feel reading those parts of the Bible. She’s keeping a lot of curse words in her book. Someone’s always about to get cursed out there. Like “Michael” and his “mom.” Or maybe Michael when his semen looks like punctuation marks. And then Michael’s like, “When does a punctuation mark look more like a comma?” And I’m like, “This is no no time to joke, Michael.” I only know one person named Michael.
Zhang’s use of the partial sentence is one of the key successes to her poems. Because she drifts your head off. You’re in the groove of her complaints about family or friends or what it means that certain curse words are used to refer to the female anatomy. But the syntax she’s using doesn’t exactly lock in with the next phrase. And it’s like, “Oh.” Literally, I think about every time I say, “Oh.” It can mean I just understood. It can also mean: Oh, maybe that’s not what you mean. And when I’m reading Zhang’s poem, the inbetween space of these two “Oh”’s is OK. Even as the poem is intent on drifting its reader to this space that feels like it’s an ending. Like if you were to populate this one neighborhood with bodies, and each body was a dream version of your father, like as he grew older these dream versions would accumulate around your family home, one was him when he scowled at dinner, one when he was posing like different flowers, trying to be imaginative for you, one time a friend who was much better at posing as a flower showed up outside. And the neighborhood’s only connective tissue was that each of these bodies made you think of your father. “Oh, that’s my father.” Somewhere in the middle of all those incarnations of a father is the truth of the matter. That’s how Zhang constructs truth.
There is something natural to the family bond that is commonly believed to be the core of who you are. The form of brother, sister, mother, and father. And, you, the daughter, who’s getting older and these poems are just writing themselves! And is who you are the family dynamics? Or the shape of people looking at you like “you’re that family” or “you’re the ones from there.” It’s well-documented that people in the United States have a really hard time dealing with any “there” that’s not the there that’s their there. Zhang’s poems are like what’s American for “there” that’s so important in this country? Why does “there” project stereotypes and anticipate what Americans think people “over there” behave like?
Keep in mind, this was the America in 2012. And reading it in 2026, readers should think not only of the complications that come with Americans projecting their “there”’s all over a body, they should also be thinking with Zhang’s poems about how complicated life is without the “there” put on her. All these layers, you might think, “Those poems sound like they’re crowded.” And I’d refer you to the previous paragraph. I already told you that. The book is crowded and funny, too. Zhang is a self that has really been changing the whole time. So the dynamic with family and immigration and getting older with your family while everyone makes things work in a country that’s new for everyone in this family. That synthesizing is why “we are all find,” as the Zhang’s title suggests.
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.