Focal Point

by Jenny Qi

Winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award, Focal Point is a scientist’s unofficial dissertation, a daughter’s faithful correspondence, and a coming-of-age story. Written largely while Jenny Qi was a young Ph.D. student conducting cancer research after her beloved mother's death from cancer, the collection turns to “all the rituals of all the faiths,” invoking Western and Eastern mythology and history, metaphors from cell biology, and even Jimi Hendrix, as Qi searches for a container to hold grief. The opening poem of this debut collection primes us to consider all definitions of the titular “focal point,” as the speaker evaluates this moment of early loss beneath a literal and metaphoric microscope. Here, the past and future converge, but from here, what does divergence look like? What can a scientific mind do except interrogate and attempt to measure the unknown and immeasurable? These poems, at once tender and suffused with wry humor, diverse in form and scope, go on to navigate illness, early relationships, racism, climate change, mass shootings, and the COVID-19 pandemic, unflinching in the face of death and the darker side of human nature. At its core, Focal Point is an uncompromising interrogation of how to be alive in the world, always loving something that has been or is in the process of being lost.

Genres: Poetry, Grief

98 pages, Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 2021

About the author

Jenny Qi is the author of the debut poetry collection Focal Point, selected by Dustin Pearson as the winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, the San Francisco Chronicle, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She has received support from such organizations as Tin House, Omnidawn, Kearny Street Workshop, the San Francisco Writers Grotto, and the San Francisco Foundation. At the end of graduate school, she co-founded and produced the science storytelling podcast Bone Lab Radio, where she wrote and talked a lot about death. Born in Pennsylvania to Chinese immigrants, she grew up mostly in Las Vegas and Nashville and now resides in San Francisco, where she completed her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology. She has been translating her late mother’s memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and immigration to the U.S. and is working on more essays and poems in conversation with this work.

Reviews

[morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just couldn't stop reading

[Michael Meyerhofer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though this is Jenny Qi's debut collection, you'd never guess it from the poems, which deftly balance emotional rawness with meticulously-crafted lyricism. The humble brilliance of this book is evident from the very first poem in which the poet (herself a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology) is forced to inject hundreds of mice with disease but goes about "...covering cages with paper so they can’t watch their sisters die". These are also the poems of a daughter sitting beside her mother's deathbed, not to mention a brilliant and quick-witted soul struggling to express her grief in a world stung by ashes, racism, and mass shootings.

But there's more than grief and heartbreak here--a lot more. For instance, consider the humor of these opening lines from THE WAY LOVE EXPIRES:

"I always spoil it with poetry, the way I spoil milk
by setting it out in the open, shining too hot a light
on its sweetness and speeding up its degradation."

Or this hilarious couplet from the poem, FIRST SPRING, 2011:

"The ice is melting. Things are growing.
Birds are fucking in the sky."

Then there's the quiet strength of these concluding lines from NORMAL:

"Mama, I finally get it,
why those surgeries broke you.
Why you were so cross about living
even as you did everything to live.

But at the same time I don’t,
because I’ll recover."

Speaking of great lines, I'm still blown away by these opening lines from ABOUT FACE:

"A friend asks have I encountered racism
due to the pandemic, after reading about attacks on women
& elderly citizens of Asian descent. I say no,

and after a pause, I don’t usually walk alone anymore.
Only with my white boyfriend, so I can borrow his skin
like a coat, wrap it tight round my neck."

There's also the wonderful simplicity of this short poem, one of my favorites from the collection, which I'll show in its entirely:

LABORATORY OBSERVATIONS

"A man in the lab next door
shuffles his feet when he walks,
hooded eyes gazing downward.
Poor unhappy grad student,
I thought. But then I saw him
rolling in with a stroller,
undaunted by the lime green
diaper bag on the handle,
unashamed of the floral
pattern that makes some men squirm.
He looked at ease for once,
publications forgotten,
experiments on hold,
too busy gazing downward,
caressing petal fingers,
parading about the lab
with his baby in his arms."

Another favorite of mine is WHAT WE GREW IN THE DESERT, near the end of the collection, which I'll also include here (and which I wish I could assign to creative writing students across the country):

"My mother wanted flowers, fragrant
and lovely. So she flooded young seeds
until they boiled in midday heat,
and when they didn’t bloom, she thought
she could will blossoms with sullen silence.

My father wanted fruit trees, hardy
and useful. So he baked saplings in the sun
until they brittled into sand,
and when they didn’t ripen, he thought
he could shout them into submission.

At night, I snuck into the garden
and sang my pleas into the leaves.
Still, the gardenia blackened and scorched,
the jasmine shot its stars into the ground,
the peaches puckered around unformed pits.

In the end, all we grew was oleander,
pink flesh burst from clay,
blowing sweet poison to the wind."

I'm already pretty familiar with Qi's work, having seen lots of it in poetry magazines over the years. In fact, she's one of those writers I always look for in the table of contents of any given magazine. So when I heard that she'd won the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award, I found myself grinning like an idiot, certain i was in for something special. But nothing could have prepared me for this excellent book--which, as I alluded to earlier, reads less like a debut collection than a veteran poet at the absolute peak of her skill.

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

“all these places I have traveled without you / so I can forget how without you I am” (Postcards from the Living, 36).

This is a prolific debut collection from Jenny Qi meditating on the relation between loss and love, written while she was a PhD student and informed by her scientific background in biology. Oftentimes, science and the arts, such as poetry, can be perceived as divorced, but Qi proves that these disciplines are only different ways of approaching the same human preoccupations: wounds and their healing.

Even as she explores and utilizes these disciplines, Qi also poignantly laments their moments of futility when a loved one is suffering: “What use is brilliance / if I can’t direct those beams at renegade cells, particles / eroding memories / of her keys on the counter, / lullabies she once sang, / our early morning strolls / by the pond where a crane once / walked into its reflection” (Radiation, 31).

The strength of Qi's approach is recording life by oscillating between micro and macro levels. In Biology Lesson 1, she asserts "cells need touch" while other poems explore that this exchange is just as necessary and volatile between humans. Her content is brilliantly in sync with her use of form: as How Men Deal ruminates on fire and ash, the spacing within the poem itself resembles burn marks and obliterated space. Qi's writing is composed of a spectacularly orchestrated collision of images: blood being scrubbed from grey sheets, a tired lab worker brightening upon holding his child, an envelope tucked under a mattress, dying laboratory mice.

Focal Point is haunting without being despairing, and Qi has a keen ability to craft opening and closing lines of poetry that feel like a punch to the gut in the best possible way; I will be thinking about “to cure a thing / is to remove it from time” (Two Cures, 45) for weeks to come.

In this collection, I especially enjoyed Psalm, Sometimes I Remember, We Will Die Beautifully in the Way of Stars, Sun Setting on San Francisco, Connection, and When This is All Over. I am honored to have received an ARC, and, as someone who has also experienced loss, can attest that this book offers both catharsis and comfort.

[this_eel · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Ramsey Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are tears in my eyes for so many different reasons. The imagery and the rawness of the emotions were captivating and delicious. I adore these works.

[Lauren R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written and an emotional journey cover to cover. I feel like I grew while reading! Qi is an exciting new voice in poetry. While working on her PhD in biology, the author explores the grief of losing her mother, the happy anxiety of new relationships and the gravity of the challenges we face as a society.

[Lawrence Pettener · Rating 4 out of 5]

This ambitious first poetry collection deals confessionally with the loss of scientist and poet Jenny Qi’s mother and her own childhood, loss of lovers and friends, ecology, racism and her mixed heritage. There is no fixed focal point linking poems sequentially; a narrative chronology threads the work instead.

After an initial poem exploring the meanings of the collection’s title, the first stand out is “First Spring 2011”, where several of the above concerns appear:

Everyone I love is dead or dying.
The sun shines garishly bright.
The ice is melting. Things are growing.
Birds are fucking in the sky.
It’s too cold and too warm,
and the earth keeps turning.

Qi is direct and to the point as doctors have to be (Qi is a medical doctor), in detailing her mother’s death and other losses; she says things as they are. These statements put the reader on an emotional rollercoaster, formed of life and death contrasts. Sky and bodies, cold and warm; humorous and grave; polarities swing the imagined experience from one extreme to another. At thirty, Qi is a young poet who has come through a lot.

“Postcards From the Living” is a powerful evocation of the poet’s deceased mother and Qi’s efforts to revive her imaginally, against scientific laws:

Remember world history class, how I translated
lectures to you each night, partly to practice,

partly to keep you with me. Every day,
there’s so much new I want to show you,

like the spongy tang of injera, pork belly
banh mi melting like butter on the tongue,

all these places I have traveled without you
so I can forget how without you I am.

Another convention is being stretched here in terms of simplicity and directness. This syntactically awkward line — “so I can forget how without you I am” — carries the conversational strength of expression that could have come from a random street interviewee indifferent to “poetry”.

"Transplant" is an aptly medical title for Qi’s mixed-heritage experience. She weighs in here on overt racism:

Friday night in San Francisco,
the fog a cold wall boxing me in,
insular contempt driving me out.

Get out of our city. Go back
to where you came from.
Techie scum. Chink.

Never mind that chinks like me
built this city, dusted its hills
and creaky trains with their bones,
painted bridges with their blood.

The protagonist not knowing whether she’s in or out is a recurring question here, rooted in bewilderment.

Qi’s take on her racial heritage continues in “About Face”:

My parents’ scoff, you will always have
a Chinese face. This impersonal rage familiar and foreign as home.

Like my last childhood house. The only place we lived
for more than a year. Everything white like a hospital sheet,
so empty and quiet I whispered when friends came over.

I’d wanted to paint my bedroom walls a color, any color,
but my parents said no, they’d just have to be repainted
when we move. They kept plastic on the sofa for protection;


It ends with the rhetorical question:

How could I have forgotten not to be comfortable.

Form as well as poetic language plays a central role briefly, the disjointed typography of “How Men Deal” reflecting difficulties with the poet’s father:

men
burn down ashes to ashes are all ash and hurt

“Virgin” reflects different hurts with a man, exploring typography further as empathic frame, while “Brother” gets more conventionally poetic:

I understood then why Mama and I
stared so hard at empty spaces

Qi’s poetry is marked throughout by a steady eloquence which comes to touching fruition in “Radiation”; its final image arriving like one of Mary Oliver’s wild birds to open into collective catharsis:

What use is brilliance
if I can’t direct those beams
at renegade cells, particles
eroding memories
of her keys on the counter,
lullabies she once sang,
our early morning strolls
by the pond where a crane once
walked into its reflection.

At other points Qi’s fevered language and mixed metaphors push our minds through synaesthetic whirls. This one, for example, in “Sometimes I remember”:

sleepless reading your words over
and over, letting black ink
melt me kaleidoscopic.

"Dear Steve", however, ends with cliché:

I will tell him he’s been born into
a world that’s not afraid of love.

Poetry’s range expands given the growing generational divide in its published authors. That last line may read as facile for readers over thirty-five, say, while many millennials given to Instagram poetry may uphold it (Qi wrote Focal Point as a young PhD student; her mother died when she was nineteen). Other images in the same poem stray into banality:

the kind of love
that sends your lion heart through blazing hoops
and rushes into your arteries faster than light

Similarly, the ending of the poem “Brother” comes up against that risk faced by all plain-speaking poets — of treading close to platitude, relying on emotion. It seems boundariless; I felt awkward reading this, like an intruder:

I like to think you would have understood me
when I was so lost without our mother.

We could have been lost together.

One senses the balance shifting as to how personal confessional poetry should be; a balance which spoken word and Instagram poets, along with mainly page poets such as Qi, Ocean Vuong and Cyril Wong (Singapore), contest.

In contrast, Qi returns to form with “Commonalities”, which is measured:

I remember how it felt to reach
for comfort and fail and keep failing,
sometimes fall so low you want
to pull someone else with you.

The shift between “fail” and “fall” enacts a disquieting onomatopoeia for the reader, Qi reflecting on the Pulse Nightclub shooting (Orlando, Florida, June 2016). The poet relates that she had frequented the club, as had the perpetrator.

Likewise, the poem “Magnificent Things” works from simple metaphorical statements:

I wept as the clock ticked
forward, burning moment
down to memory. It was always
a ghost in the making.

The same poem ends:

In the dark, I rehearse
my slow waltz with loss.
I know the steps by heart.

The waltz image chimes with “this body that is always two steps back” in the next poem, the delightfully evocative “First Spring, 2020”.

Qi’s synesthetic eloquence is on a roll as the end of the collection nears. She conveys a delicate fragility further on in the same poem, via internal rhymes and alliteration:

I can conjure
the memory of pink petals lining sidewalks,

bursting from branches so thin I wonder
can they teach us how to hold this weight.
The light is so bright and cold. I remember

this light, the dissonance of grief in the spring

At the end of this poem grief brings Qi back to the body, source of grounding in her daily career and arguably a focal point throughout the collection:

A knot blooms in my stomach,
a bitterness bubbling up my throat.


The high point of the collection comes in breathless passages in “When This is all Over”, which brush conventional logic aside with celebratory sweeps of syntax:

the heron walking into the pond,
small white reflection
emerging from the verdure,
so lush it brushes the sky teal;
bees floating from poppy
to lupine to cobweb thistle,
tender hum and churn
like waves lapping the shore
like language like love so certain
how could it be any other way?

The absence of a comma after “language” or punctuation after “certain” only serves to heighten the growing passion. It ends in high spirits:

& at the end squinting into the bright
ocean, once described by the Greeks
as wine, because they didn’t have words
for the color blue or there wasn’t yet blue
or maybe they were drunk
off its immensity

The placement of poems in a collection is itself a poem of sorts; credit to Qi for saving a big hitter for the end. The final poem, “Contingencies”, comprises large, cosmic brushstrokes.

Everywhere somewhere is burning and it’s too late to look back.

The use of ‘Everywhere somewhere’ has a positively disorienting effect; the mood builds further:

I wake up in the dark smell smoke
so familiar I don’t think twice.

Qi returns to the ineffable:

it could not be measured, the scale
of these days beyond conceiving—

how the ancients imagined us,
what it means to be immeasurable.

Qi’s infinite scope recalls those other exploratory Americans: the beatniks, Jim Morrison even, and his better colleague in poetry Michael McClure. Her relative youth may well signal more startling work to come.

Focal Point’s last line extends Whitmanesque, to identify with the cosmos:

I would be the mountain and the stars—
be that immovable and that transient.



Lawrence Pettener is a poet and editor living in Subang Jaya, Malaysia. This review first appeared in Asian Review of Books online in March 2022, alongside LP’s other poetry reviews.

[HeatherIlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first book I have finished in what feels like ages.

Jenny Qi’s poetry has helped me during a time when I am struggling with grief of my own. Her work is complex, yet healing.

And I highly recommend attending an event where Qi shares her poetry because it’s fantastic.

[Kelly Grace Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, vulnerable look at grief and its many thorns and flours. Beautiful and captivating poetry!

[Kiersten · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book last month and have been so excited waiting to share it with you guys! Focal Point is Jenny Qi’s debut poetry collection, written while she was a Ph.D student and in response to her mother’s death.

The collection is so beautifully written, and I adored the ways Qi tied her experience and knowledge as a scientist into the poems themselves. The collection uses both science and poetry to explore and talk about her loss of her mother in a way that was both heartbreaking and really unique.

I think my favorites in the collection were Distribution, Letters to My Mother, Little Fires, Brother, Biology Lesson 2, and Palmistry.

[Kerri Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, moving collection centered on grief (loss of the author's mother to cancer, specifically), family, and living as an Asian American in a county forever centering white supremacy.

This book [from its structure to its content to so many viscerally honest lines] made me and my own writing feel seen the way only a book about loss can.

I remember grief as a hollow,
so sharp it felt like hunger,
so large I felt exceptional.

— from "Commonalities"


[Five stars for so many poems I'm going to read over and over and over again, and for the timely reminder that I have good creative instincts. I'm so grateful small-but-mighty books like this exist.]

[Becca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Focal Point is aptly titled because it a collection of poems that instantly propel the reader into a myriad of reflections. Qi is masterfully able to weave stories around death, grief, and scientific interrogation seamlessly. Whether it is through a poem about the Bay Area fog or contemplating what love means for poets, she captures the reader’s complete attention. This act of seeing and intentional focus is what makes these poems so intimate and leaves the reader changed by the last page.

[Laetitia · Rating 4 out of 5]

it’s so rare for a writer to have so much control over their voice in a debut collection, but qi is precise & incising & graceful all at once. locating personal grief in a time of mass grief, qi carves a necessary space for her & her reader to inhabit—a space where everything we love/have loved/will love can always exist. at a time in my life filled w so much anticipatory grief, this was an especially important read for me

[Caitlin]

In Focal Point Circe and Penelope gain voice, and a dead wife speaks from beyond the tomb. Science becomes tender or tragic or glorious, and the fogs of San Francisco choke out life. Focal Point is a collection of deep sadness, of the memory and the presence of pain and loss and grief, but it is also a work of aching, staggering beauty.

More: https://essentiallyanerd.wordpress.co...

[Beth Winegarner · Rating 5 out of 5]

I lost my mom when I was in my early 20s, and in that sense I found this book incredibly comforting and affirming. But you don't need to have had that experience to love Qi's beautiful, approachable poetry. And, laced in between the sorrow and grief are real moments of humor and joy. So, so good.

[Marian Urquilla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Piercing, delicate, gorgeous poems. Love the interlacing of grief, science, and memory. Plus San Francisco!

[Pete Hsu · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully composed and intelligent collection focused on the enduring power of grief and love.

[Stephanie Wildman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Watch this new talent - the poems are so moving.

[Troy Kozak · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is really an aspirational collection. I think she’s got a lot of talent as a poet, but this seems more like an emerging collection. I’m really looking forward to how she progresses.

[Queer · Rating 5 out of 5]

dream of your mom after she has been dead for years