Yearling
-
- $20.99
-
- $20.99
Publisher Description
"Defiant and uncategorizable, Lo Kwa Mei-en's Yearling, with its teeming species, battles, and passions, read like an illuminated manuscript: mysterious, visceral, awe-full. Hers are some of the most enviable poems I have ever read, and herald Mei-en as the new standard bearer for innovative structure, terrifying acknowledgment, ecstatic statement, and, I daresay, beauty."—Kathy Fagan
Lo Kwa Mei-en's Yearling explores adolescence through a deeply moving and poignantly raw lens. As the speaker ages, so too does the poetry, creating laments for the loss of friendship, the loss of species, and sometimes the loss of humanity itself. Harsh, forlorn and yet effervescent, Mei-en's lyricism perfectly captures the ethos of youth in an unsure world.
From "Rara Avis Decoy":
Wild diamond rocking on the floor
of a predatory boat. Point & say sweet traitor
to the wood & water for wanting to be made
of both. My name is I know not what I am
as a country of mothers & fathers comes down.
They call me sleeping beauty. I dream I am
in flight, body unfolding, folding, a bullet
wounding water again & again—the mysterious
love of a father & mother a two-barreled
gaze. The gun in my dream speaks my name
& sees a beating vein. Takes aim—
Lo Kwa Mei-en is from Singapore and Ohio. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Guernica, the Kenyon Review, West Branch, and other journals, and won the Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The title of Mei-en's debut, a term applied to an animal in its first or second year, suggests the collection's deep interest in the body, and the unruly verve of the poems within. The collection is organized in three sections, and its interests "age" as the book progresses, with Mei-en's confident and musical verse shining throughout. The poems are marked by an alliterative idiom and riddle-like playfulness, as in "Marvel by the morning, morning by the mile, mother,/ I was not wise," or "Wife-beatered, bedroom burst with birds/ and sons." The influence of fairy tales is evident, and Mei-en also reimagines and spins animal stories that take on the scale of myth. The poems are both elegiac and energetic, moving "like the half-great,/ sea-chewed halfgirls on the old merchant prows," and full of memorable scenes, as when "stars slouch like fat coins in the mud." She pulls that energy from strange and startling juxtapositions, as well as details that draw on ritual and rebellion: "I am here, at last, dressed in plain mustard and tiger,/ carrying on with my heart-claw and faulty calendar,/ the old fetishes spit and spice and sea loaded/ behind my teeth." Texturally and sonically rich, Mei-en explores memory, loss, and place with dynamic flourishes.