Primordial
Poems
-
- ¥1,400
発行者による作品情報
Mai Der Vang’s poetry—lyrically insistent and visually compelling—constitutes a groundbreaking investigation into the collective trauma and resilience experienced by Hmong people and communities, the ongoing cultural and environmental repercussions of the war in Vietnam, the lives of refugees afterward, and the postmemory carried by their descendants. Primordial is a crucial turn to the ecological and generational impact of violence, a powerful and rousing meditation on climate, origin, and fate.
With profound and attentive care, Vang addresses the plight of the saola, an extremely rare and critically endangered animal native to the Annamite Mountains in Laos and Vietnam. The saola looks like an antelope, with two long horns, and is related to wild cattle, though the saola has been placed in a genus of its own. Remarkably, the saola has only been known to the outside world since 1992, and sightings are so rare that it has now been more than a decade since the last known image of one was captured in a camera trap photo in 2013.
Primordial examines the saola’s relationship to Hmong refugee identity and cosmology and a shared sense of exile, precarity, privacy, and survival. Can a war-torn landscape and memory provide sanctuary, and what are the consequences for our climate, our origins, our ability to belong to a homeland? Written during a difficult pregnancy and postpartum period, Vang’s poems are urgent stays against extinction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The insistent and formally experimental third collection from Vang (Yellow Rain) turns her incisive poetic eye to the critically endangered saola—a bovine native to Laos and Vietnam—to explore themes of colonialism, war, and extinction. "I am a secret that exists," she writes in "Evolution, Absence," which draws compelling resonances between the plight of the Hmong people and the threats facing saolas, also known as Asian unicorns for their elusiveness. Moving skillfully between human and animal worlds, the speaker's voice captures a state of psychic restlessness: "sometimes I want to cut loose/ the animal in my cortex, tear into this ache. There is/ no such thing as new pain,/ only the same pain recycled a/ hundred ways." Elsewhere, the speaker reflects on her pregnancy, reaching toward the saola in pursuit of connection: "I search my being for grace I share/ with you, extent of my presence/ from feet to head, incision under my belly/ from where my baby emerged." Vang's poems are visually stirring, conjuring diagrams and word clouds that, on occasion, feel overextended. Nonetheless, this is an ambitious and impassioned contribution to contemporary poetry.
