Yearling

by Lo Kwa Mei-en

"Defiant and uncategorizable, Lo Kwa Mei-en's Yearling , with its teeming species, battles, and passions, read like an illuminated 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.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

First published March 23, 2015

Reviews

[Chaneli · Rating 4 out of 5]

love love love this!
can't wait to pick up the new collection (:

just like Brenda Brueggemann said in her blurb: "You can't step in Yearling and then come back out the same." I completely agree. Going to be thinking about this collection for a long time and recomend to all.

[Maria Hiers · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It’s a zoo in here, & it’s so hard to exist / on the same side of the glass as you.”

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was a thrilling work with some exquisite lines. An inventive and fulfilling collection to be sure.

[Tristan · Rating 5 out of 5]

So I'm finally getting around to reading Yearling a year and a half after I first read The Bees Make Money in the Lion (which you'd think I'd have a review of; I've read it four times, but no because I've always read it for school stuff and been too busy to review).

Yearling was brilliant, strange and estranging, elegant, fluid, and musical. Learning harder (somehow) on both the real world and fantasy than her second book, Mei-en fills the book with tenderness and power--this is poetry at its finest. The poems are about experience which is a cheap thing to say because all poems are about experience of one kind or another, but these are simultaneously about being experienced and about what it means to experience things. "Taxi, Singapore, Ohio" is not the only poem that sings of Mei-en's declaration that she is "from Singapore and Ohio" but it is, unsurprisingly, the most obvious about it. Questions about gender and womanhood echo throughout the collection, especially in the poems of "Pinocchia", a girl searching for her reality, most powerfully evoked in "Pinocchia from Pleasure Island" which begins

Now I think of what I'd die to forget. Now I forget.
Where did I grow up, get out--was I as rich as a golden
yolk waiting to crack in the hay? Where I come from
would I go back? If yes, reload me. And if yes, accident,
but nobody can brave enough to see we're just buck
-shot spat from out the mouth of a motherland. So, bang,

and which circles back on itself to end,

shot, spat out from the mouth of a mother. So, band,
but nobody can be brave enough to see I'm just bucked.
Would I go back? If yes, reload me. If yes, accident,
yolk waiting to crack in the hay. Where I come from,
where did I get out? Was I richly young and golden?
Now, I think of what I'd die to forget.

I have trouble identifying favorite poems because the whole thing was so gorgeously immersive, but "The Body as an Empty Cup" ("I see what you see--girl all appetite / riddled with holes. No, my throat has not drunk // down a barrel of Dawn."), "Yearling and Armor" ("And if I let hot ritual wrap its arms abotu me. / Then another, and another. And felt the body move again / like a mouthful of sea, or a yearling in the armory") and "Canon with Wolves in the Water" ("How a wolf watching water is how I want / how I want to love the new apocalypse for good."), along with everything mentioned already, deserve a bit of special attention even among such illustrious company. Higly recommended.

[chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once, I saw the alarming & cooled heart of myself,
the swallower & expert of damage but not of repair

in myself, & found new ways to give it all

away. Made a gun of two fingers & a thumb, jerked
to the throat, hunting & hunting & turning in the dark.

& O bright star of disaster, I have been lit.
-- "Through a Glass Through Which We Cannot See"

Now say my name till saying kills. Now
break, break. And throw me down on bales of bold
earth, where all that burns is never, and ever, enough.
-- "Devil of Defiance"

May the meek inherit
something gorgeous. May I. May a geography of
defiant climes shock the ocean's flesh, its fish many
thunders -- may they ring true. May we. May

I run in our sleep, keeping up and more with kings
too great to see in the dark. Too great to see grow
the tides, each made in the image of a shut door.
Behind, god, a school of tongues, singing the keys.
-- "The Extinction Diaries: Psalm"

O germ in the frantic
husk of the feeling body. Beware. It's war. Unfold. You learn fire and fire
learns you. It has followed you here before. It feeds you through
the year like a jet skein of mane through an original fist and chariots
from the canopy to snow to belly to black to the edge of your name.
Tongues of ash break off small bites of the map and its body. What's left
calls itself firstborn, final leg, lone backbone the length of an arrow
shot, the mark flown, a badland, fauna played out in the dark.
-- "hic sunt dracones"

My body's a dress (cut from a fond hell I tore
off the tongue of the real)
-- "Pinnochia from Pleasure Island"

When do we go back for what
we came for,

and what half
-broken strap of weather holds itself up,

like a blindfold, to the shuddering
vein of horizon, for

one thing to fly, suddenly
singing, beneath it.
-- "Addiction"

I birth babes not born
of blood exactly, so they cry. They are my smallest
sunrise in the galaxy, amen. All night long I scratch
the unforgiving skins in my head. I suture the sails
of a fucked boat. For love, I'd eat this planet up to
get us to the next.
-- "Pinnochia Sends Home the Manifesto"

Love, the great butcher, kept us flesh as hell, diving

for dark terrain, but who can swim with open arms?
It is good to be unafraid of death, we say, crawling

high through a hot wave of weeds. Come, we swear
you will rise in fields again, ears raw, burst with grain.
-- "This Is Siren Country"

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is immediately evident in Yearling is the author's facility with language — the lines feel fine-tuned down to the molecule, and the syntax is like sorcery in spots, with repetition and rhyme creating a number of incantatory stretches. At times, it feels like the poets can't help herself, so enraptured and almost delirious she is with sounds (and while it all feels intentional, moments can feel overgrown or over-pruned). The images that result bend toward the florid and fantastic, with most of the poems peddling in cryptic concerns: the body, identity, place, damage. A few pieces, like "Taxi, Singapore, Ohio," allow personal detail to break the surface, and I hoped for more in that vein. Still, an intoxicating collection.

[EP · Rating 1 out of 5]

The first poem was really good! Then the rest happened!

Some start strong and just lose me

Some seem to me complete gibberish

There’s a video game called Nier: Automata, and in this game there’s a feature that lets you create a message for whenever you die, so people who find your body see the message. Now, this message ends up being a selection of 2 or 3 phrases that are vaguely related but ultimately doesn’t make sense, it’s just what sounds best to you, so you’ll get something random like “a dying angel fought on a tower of fools without a left hand.” Doesn’t make sense really but it might sound appealing to some.

That’s what these poems felt like. Just random phrases thrown together that might sound appealing to some.

[Tay Arrow · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is a masterpiece

[Jason Berlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great to read over and over.

[Paul]

Review at asianamlitfans.