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toniclark's review
5.0
Jenna Lê, the daughter of Vietnam War refugees, is an American poet and MD. This is her third collection of poetry. I’m sorry to say that I haven’t read her first two books, but I intend to remedy that.
There is a way of working in traditional poetic form without using formal language and this is my favorite kind of contemporary poetry. I admire poets who ring the changes on those forms. Some are so clever that they can sneak them right past your rhyme-and-meter radar. And somehow, poems imbued with the ghost of tradition always seem to me to expand in meaning, to carry more weight. Jenna Lê is a master of this kind of writing, an expert at blending traditional form with fresh, relevant content and a conversational style to achieve subtlety and impact. Her forms include the ghazal, sonnet, ballad, and golden shovel, as well as ekphrastics. Her poems are highly personal, and sometimes political, with content drawn from family life, medical knowledge, social commentary, art and science. The collection also includes several poems about, or in memory of, specific people — e.g., Kate Spade, Patti Smith, John Ashbery, Tina Modotti (Italian photographer and political activist), Marie Curie, Delmira Agustini (Uruguayan poet).
One of my favorites is “The Morning After the Election” (the 2016 election, that is), which begins with three strangers waiting at a bus stop and ends with:
"A surge of fellow feeling warms the sky
around us three, a fragile tender flutter.
In this new world, we must protect each other."
And will not forget:
“What fibs we tell
to gloss over the fact
God’s fly is always down.”
— from “How We Met”
There is a way of working in traditional poetic form without using formal language and this is my favorite kind of contemporary poetry. I admire poets who ring the changes on those forms. Some are so clever that they can sneak them right past your rhyme-and-meter radar. And somehow, poems imbued with the ghost of tradition always seem to me to expand in meaning, to carry more weight. Jenna Lê is a master of this kind of writing, an expert at blending traditional form with fresh, relevant content and a conversational style to achieve subtlety and impact. Her forms include the ghazal, sonnet, ballad, and golden shovel, as well as ekphrastics. Her poems are highly personal, and sometimes political, with content drawn from family life, medical knowledge, social commentary, art and science. The collection also includes several poems about, or in memory of, specific people — e.g., Kate Spade, Patti Smith, John Ashbery, Tina Modotti (Italian photographer and political activist), Marie Curie, Delmira Agustini (Uruguayan poet).
One of my favorites is “The Morning After the Election” (the 2016 election, that is), which begins with three strangers waiting at a bus stop and ends with:
"A surge of fellow feeling warms the sky
around us three, a fragile tender flutter.
In this new world, we must protect each other."
And will not forget:
“What fibs we tell
to gloss over the fact
God’s fly is always down.”
— from “How We Met”
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