The speaker of these poems is engaged in a duality of seeing, at once the teenage daughter devastated by her father’s announcement of his terminal cancer diagnosis and a present observer of the costs of assimilation in her own and her mother’s life: “what it means to try beyond recognition.” Which of these malignancies is the more vicious? The loss of the father himself or the cleaving of ancestry and story, his retreat into myth? Like the swarm, the poems circle and shift around these questions, but do not land, forming narrative shapes that appear solid but are in fact mutable, searching the myriad trajectories of home, history, and self.
Leung employs a range of form and structural elements to delineate loss, beginning in the first poem, “This Is to Live Several Lives,” where dotted lines surround and connect fragmentary phrases that lead to larger sections of text, visually conjuring the swarm while also suggesting the accumulation of past within the present and the boundaries between interior and public selves:
....................I am trying to be both.............................................
...................................................................................................
...................................................................................................
.................................................................a daughter..................
.................................................................a ghost.......................
The ghostly dots evoke a kind of synaptic hum between phrases before Leung jumps to an extended quote from Ghostly Matters: Haunting of the Sociological Imagination, by Avery Gordon, “on the drive to narrate the history that hurts: ‘It is about putting / life back in where only a vague memory or bare trace was visible to those who bothered to look.’”
In this new context, the dots become pinpricks or suture marks—evidence of both harm and healing, or perhaps they are filling a gap in a narrative, as an ellipsis would. Leung relates an origin story about her father, which may or may not be true, surrounded by a field of dots:
Another myth: my father swimming from mainland China to
then British occupied Hong Kong. When he was caught, he dis-
appeared for a while into the fields. One can say he worked there
and discovered the body as an ox that could keep on even if