How to not be afraid of everything

Jane Wong

Book - 2021

"Explores the vulnerable ways we articulate and reckon with fear: fear of intergenerational trauma and the silent, hidden histories of families. What does it mean to grow up in a take-out restaurant, surrounded by food, just a generation after the Great Leap Forward famine in 1958-62. Full of elegy and resilient joy, these poems speak across generations of survival. How much of the world do we fear? How can we find comfort and ancestral power in this fear?"--

Saved in:

2nd Floor Show me where

811.6/Wong
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 811.6/Wong Checked In
Subjects
Genres
Poetry
Published
Farmington, Maine : Alice James Books [2021]
Language
English
Main Author
Jane Wong (author)
Physical Description
79 pages ; 23 cm
ISBN
9781948579216
  • Mad
  • Everything
  • An Altar
  • The Frontier
  • Tenants
  • What I Tell Myself before I Sleep
  • A Cosmology
  • The Frontier
  • The Cactus
  • What I Tell Myself after Waking Up with Fists
  • I Put on My Fur Coat
  • Lessons on Lessening
  • After My Father Leaves, My Mother Opens the Windows
  • Dream of the Lopsided Crown
  • When You Died
  • After He Travels through Ash, My Grandfather Speaks
  • The Frontier
  • I Haul a House out of the Bay
  • How to Not Be Afraid of Everything
  • What Is Love if Not Rot
  • The Beet
  • Wrong June
  • The Egg
  • Unkindly Kind
  • Notes for the Interior
  • The Long Labors
  • After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly
  • Notes and Acknowledgments
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Wong (Overpour) explores loss, grief, migration, colonization, and alienation in her searching and resilient second collection. "To be a good daughter means to carry everything with you at all times," she writes, enacting the heavy burden of carrying, where "Sometimes there is nothing to say or/ give at all." The works interrogate the Maoist Great Leap Forward, which resulted in 36 million deaths due to starvation, as well as question America, where the speaker wonders: "can't I have what I've been/ promised? This shore and this sea,/ shining always, thereafter?" Wong's poems subvert conventional ideas about America: "And what is there/ to see," Wong asks before answering, "rusty shipping containers." There's also a pointed critique of excesses of wealth set in a world where "we watch banks being built on ancient/ ground," and "hurricanes have/ the name of any decent receptionist." Wong's powerful poems draw the reader's attention and insist the audience not look away. (Oct.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

An opening note to Wong's second collection (after Overpour) describes the Maoist campaign known as the Great Leap Forward, which resulted in tens of millions of deaths from famine in the People's Republic of China between 1958 and 1962; Wong dedicates a poem to members of her family who went missing or died in the famine. In many ways, the entire collection converses with ghosts, whether through invocation of the "good daughter," address of an absent gambler father, or the thematically resonant invocation of food and its decay. One of the best poems links superficially disparate lines, giving readers the sense of connecting a puzzle from its outer pieces in. For instance, "Everything" introduces toxic boars in Japan, a fork as potential weapon, and an admonition to suspect men who call from balconies, all of which reappear, woven into a poetic whole linking family, xenophobia, cultural assimilation, and the past. Not a spare word remains. Frequent poetry readers will appreciate the formal diversity of the collection and its use of empty space. A poem might appear as hyphenated phrases in a paragraph, in Mad Libs style, or as simple enjambed free verse. VERDICT The collection often surprises in its playfulness or self-deprecation, given the weight of the poems' subject matter, and is a solid addition to poetry collections.--Amy Dickinson, Montrose Regional Lib. District, CO

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.