Poor Anima

by Khaty Xiong

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. "Khaty Xiong writes a penumbra poetry. In POOR ANIMA, lyric and narrative intertwine to form a site where 'blacknesses trade spaces with each other, extensions/of shadow and smoke.' Xiong's poetry is also a sacrificial poetry, both in the sense that it knows and performs ritual, and in the sense that it gives itself up, completely, to currents that it perceives but can't tame. Don't be tricked into thinking that Xiong's limpid language is the result of uncomplicated thinking. These poems are deeply strange, deeply courageous, deeply beautiful. They 'grow back the mysteriousness passed on/through the exodus we sprang from.'"—Elizabeth Robinson

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2015

Reviews

[Vi Nao]

Khaty Xiong's bicultural text is riddled and conflicted with the bifurcation between traditional and experiment, between Hmong ritual and Caucasian despair, between mother that swells like a mountain and warfare father. Like the cover of this beautiful collection, Xiong's poetic and collage-like songs are driven by a bouquet of emotional and cultural clamors, impulses of pain, epistolary confessions, death of brother, elegies of earthly river, tree, teeth, lapping ash, lemongrass. We ache with her as she arranges the content of her Hmong heart for this lexical ceremony, a text compelled by ethnic awkwardness, aesthetic, artistic and biological divisions of allegiance. This text is more poignant and is even more heartbreaking with the recent death of Xiong's mother. Once you embrace Xiong's Poor Anima, you have decided to usher your exile with Xiong's exile. Read her as if you were a bouquet of dripping water. As if you weren't born into two conflicting cultural bodies. As if you had been "escorted by shadows" into her retreat of taste and tiger and sempiternal abattoirs. As if you had been haunted by Nicaragua.

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are so many powerful images and refrains here. The study of loss, motherhood, and war.

Some of my favorite moments:

You're in paper never mind the alphabet.

I imagine the langue between a taken seat and an empty seat.

It's having loved a terrible thing
that gives the sky autonomy.

A yellow day stretching
the day is a yellow dog.

[Gigi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning poetry that captures a unique and underrepresented narrative.

[ej · Rating 5 out of 5]

An affecting poetry collection I will revisit, often.