Leung enacts the division of (inner)self from (outer)self, personal from political, and present from historical in her use of form throughout the collection. “The project: because no one talks about remainders, I hope to draw the line from here to there, scattering / in between the points, a nominal [feeling] of what an absence looks like when dispersed,¹” she announces in the introductory couplet of “The Plural Circuits of Tell,” a poem that threads the needle between Marianne Moore and an academic essay as it recounts her parents’ experiences with cancer and the metastasizing resurgence of anti-Asian hate fomented by the Trump administration in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Here, historical and scientific footnotes at times threaten to overwhelm the poem on the page, and we observe the burden of proof that the speaker feels she must provide to substantiate the alienation and loss she feels, as if such experiences of traumas weren’t weight enough:
“Once” is a type of beginning.² When I was younger, I began
every story with “Once” as a way of signaling
the singular arrangement of our time.
she tells us, and for a moment there is hope in that fairy tale word. But the footnote immediately reminds us that “ ‘Once’ is also recitation. The story that would not be forgotten.” Throughout the poem, what is “not forgotten” constantly interrupts. The imagined “child wandering into the mangled / course of the woods” is made real: her mother’s wish to revisit her ancestral home in Guangzhou is thwarted when a relative warns of a murderous motorcyclist roaming the area decapitating his victims with a “a length of sharp wire.” The speaker is frozen—“turn[ed] doe”— when addressed by “another Asian woman’s name,” and the xenophobia she detects in the mistake parallels a cancerous cell multiplying “in the face of some unnameable loneliness.”
In enacting these disjunctions, Leung seems to warn against the lyrical urge, our need to find singular beauty or truth. Thus, even in witnessing her father’s death (from pancreatic cancer initially misdiagnosed as an ulcer)—“the veins shined bright green… Never had I ever seen a body work so hard at being / still.”— she interposes memories of her mother’s high school, named for William Seward, whose eponymous trade treaty between the US and China eventually led to the Chinese Exclusion Act when rising immigration from China created a political backlash. Painfully close as this death is, Leung observes it as “work” that is both singular and born of a lineage of exploitation and expulsion. Her mother, a cancer survivor herself, seems to agree with this anti-lyric stance, refusing to “call remission anything except the absence of tumor. No talk of / gratitude or religiosity.” To admit gratitude would also be an admission of a desire for life, a risky act in an America, the poem’s footnote reminds us, that continues to scapegoat China as an economic and, with the advent of Covid-19, biological threat.