Suede Mantis / Soft Rage

by Jennifer Soong

Swaying between command and curiosity, acquiescence and destruction, distance and proximity, Jennifer Soong's Suede Mantis / Soft Rage proffers tenderness that teeters on the precipice of loss. Premised on this peril is not a paralyzing grief but a generative poiesis of "cruel desperation," in which poetry pronounces itself in contrasts and conditionals, had beens and renunciations. Like a tongue that tans flesh, like passion that's made pliable by the pulsing and glistening of language, Suede Mantis / Soft Rage is the negotiated labor of a process rather than a product, raising interior operations to the surface while presenting an antithesis to mimetic construction. Neo-romantic and post-pastoral, the poems in Soong's second collection reinvigorate lyric possibility. "As I try to make way through, but ultimately fall--or slide--down the ruins of empire toward what feels like a fast-approaching yet ever more uncertain end, I am finding myself in increasing, practical need of books like Jennifer Soong's Suede Mantis / Soft Rage . With its acid love balladry, affirmational pessimism, and percipient, angular grief, it slows, it is slowing me, down, sharpening my faculties, reintegrating my mind into and, even better, out of itself."--Brandon Shimoda, author of The Desert "In The Words of Selves, Denise Riley writes that the 'self-describing I produces an unease which can't be mollified by any theory of its constructed nature,' and this seems to be the problem that is at the center of Jennifer Soong's engaging second collection. Beginning with a renunciation and then building upon a foundation of dazzling lyric and uncanny koans, Suede Mantis / Soft Rage practices a ranging formal hunger in an environment where the speaker calmly declares 'the object of my life faces the objection of my world.' Soong's poems recall Riley's exquisite verses, certainly, but they also recall the assured, autonomous density of Lissa Wolsak's work, in that their language surprises and baffles, drives into pastoral ecstasy and bleak enstasy. 'The solar pulses beat brilliantly through the trees,' but to 'learn to write it terribly,' we must remember that there is 'no destruction without self- / no destruction without self- / difficulties.' There is a gulf between abolition of self and explosion of self, and Soong's vivid poetry is suspended above that chasm, hovering as if by obscenity or miracle or both."--Ted Rees, author of Dog Day Economy "A series of lyric refractions which wrangle a self and the experience of the world into language, Jennifer Soong's Suede Mantis / Soft Rage engages with poetry's incorrigible taste for plurality, its mutations and re-productions. By turns arch, expansive, and direct, and negotiating the footwork of pronouns, Suede Mantis / Soft Rage works toward the extraordinary understanding that love's poetics might resolve themselves purely as an undoing, a study of unraveled ends, as effacements in the direction of paradise."--Imogen Cassels, author of Chesapeake Poetry.

107 pages, Paperback

First published October 11, 2022

Reviews

[Taylor Napolsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

I noted the hell out of this, marked it with stickies and read it twice. The language is melancholic and mournful, yet also fierce and pointed, as though directing the reader to do I’m not sure what…commanding me to pay attention. It’s avant garde and can be impenetrable, which I don’t mind. I got lost in it and enjoyed myself. Any messages seem smeared over and I like it that way….

[Glassworks Magazine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reviewed by Lesley George on www.rowanglassworks.org.

Carefully balancing lyric poem conventions with a bold delineation of human emotion, Dr. Jennifer Soong plays with different aesthetic forms in her recently released collection, Suede Mantis / Soft Rage. Soong explores a variety of poetic compositions—it is very much so a project of the mind, a submittance to raw emotions in exchange for a curious, but risque, visual sorting of thoughts.

The collection is set into three parts, each one focusing on a different style of poetic disposition. Soong begins with highlighting the theme of looking back on memories and allowing the emotions attached to them to come to life. From then her work moves page-to-page, long and flowing until a page break. As she writes, her words become more pointed, but with intention she experiments with the expectations of a poem, denouncing the pride attached to poems and creating a space where she can reject any significance they’re supposed to hold in her life and write freely.

Like many poets, Soong has a lot of pieces that center the theme of love; however, she expresses love not for the fuzzy and warm feeling, but for the death of budding love:

“old shirt
stab your love for him
make it die
an old shirt, like a puddle on the floor."

This theme of death, of abandonment of painful feelings and memories is expressed in such a delicate way despite the intensity of the words showcases Soong’s ability to toy with juxtaposing concepts. At times, her words feel conversational, almost as though she is talking either to herself, and, sometimes, to someone else—like if she is giving a warning for others to learn from her past.

Her pieces titter on the edge of being abstract with just enough mystery, with the help of vivid imagery and a blend of poetic voice and candid phrasing, to create pieces that highlight her own self reflection. Soong directly speaks to the reader as she does so:

“Stay with me, or else
these words were clipped for nothing.
…not even in misery, our mutual feeling.
…What would be the point of that, reader,
save to cut you with the blunt end
of my face reproduced in the knife? (lines 1-10).

Focusing more on the visual depiction of the text, each part alternates between one solid black page and a page with three flowers in a line as the section breaks. This also exemplifies the oppositional nature of softness and bluntness of the piece as a whole—Soong does this in very intentional methods that if it were to be unintentional, it would be very telling of the complexity of the emotions she is experiencing while crafting her work.

There is no incorrect way to depict Soong’s words and by this I mean, the conversational nature of her words are so inviting that they can be applied to a variety of situations. In her message to the reader, she writes:

“Everything I have previously written I renounce. Those poems matter little to me now. They bore me and don't even embarrass me. …Should this, with its enclosed contents, one day meet its same fate, I will have the necessary act in mind.”

Soong embodies, through her words, the belief of moving forward and never looking back, moving through the pain and the love, moving through the ups and downs, moving through passages of time and of life—authentic. She lives authentically through each piece until the very last line of the collection. While Suede Mantis / Soft Rage is a monologue of her thoughts and a lesson to move on, because there’s no purpose in dwelling on the past.

[Restfulsimulation · Rating 5 out of 5]

duh, one of the best young american poets around

[hjh]

"Despite the world, always, I am/ because of it" (22)

"After the wonder/ all I wanted/ was a plainness/ in which to eat/ shit and sleep" (23)

"The object of my life faces the objection of my world" (25)

"and the mountains compress into horizontality/leaking through clouds/ trees rupture into more trees" (27)

"finally finding out/ free love/ was never free/ endless love/ just a loop" (30)

"I get nervous/ thinking everyone wants something from me" (30)

"the forms of mild confusion/ burn off with the sun. So much of the sky's rage/ was hiding.../ The reflected obliques of waves/ foamed at crevices, our Adidas/ skimmed over swimming moss/ As we made our way back and forth for six days" (31)

"or am I thinking alone? / lostness be with me / the trees are self-fondling / no one *thinks* to despair" (36)

"then/gently/ everything/ blows/ and/ blows/ up" (46)

"following the pony of doom/ into the wet tail slashing empire/ implacable as gray frost/ I am witness the lover" (50)

"a focus group for/ disappearing things/ nondescript earth/ peripheral hand neuropathy" (54)

"to be as close to the love object as possible/ perpetual communication/ with great hunger comes/ great skepticism" (64)

"grand life lesson/ get my emotions involved/ my cruel desperation's/ what you remind me of" (74)

"the anorexic knows it's not poetic/ it's anti-social tactics/ learning from sprawling forums/ feeling special" (78)

"but tired of your words/ you will become your body/ your body will begin to gnaw/ for you" (79)

"I think in you, the failure/ to control the immensity of your suffering makes you/ frightening to the people nearest you" (86)