North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2020. 69 pages. $17.95.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil chose Fablesque by Anna Maria Hong for Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize well before the mise en abyme of 2020, a year in which hatred and disaster continue to one-up each other, apparently endlessly. Yet Hong’s second collection—with its evocation of medieval bestiaries, fairy tales, and recurrent violence—demonstrates how history rhymes. Hong also links temporal weirdness to the slipperiness of identity at any life or geopolitical crux: when you don’t even know what time it is, how can you know who you’ll be when the masks come off? In this palimpsest of a collection, Hong explores what it means to be, as she puts it in “Snow Goose,” a “grown hybrid, the woman / animal wearing her own skin.” Both cerebral and risky, Fablesque develops a timely vocabulary for self-reinvention.
Fablesque is twisty, moving, defiant, and wonkish right from the outset. Hong opens with a once-upon-a-time poem titled “Heliconius Melpomene” after the postman butterfly, which avoids becoming prey by mimicking the markings of poisonous species. After ten associative lines about the butterfly, however, the poem begins again, shifting to prose with the declarative sentence, “When my father was 19, North Korean soldiers invaded the South, descending upon Seoul University where my father was studying chemistry.” A pretty lyric with a toxic edge metamorphoses into a tale of human masquerade that also constitutes testimony about military assault. Disjunction isn’t a literary strategy for Hong so much as a feature of experience itself, because poems can’t be divorced from the forces that condition them.
Launching a series of poems about trauma, “Heliconius Melpomene” constructs a history of imprisonment and escape, during which a father-to-be outwits hungry, predatory soldiers by imitating a “Northern rural accent”—faking a different identity to preserve his life. Flash forward to thirteen-year-old Hong interpreting this tale as a “parable of his own cunning and lack of disabling empathy,” and then to the adult daughter’s scholarly opinion that her father’s core narrative “has the simplicity of a fairy tale: three brothers, three forks in the road, three wishes.” Further, his story, inevitably, begets others. “Heliconius Melpomene” is a stunner of a poem, almost a lyric essay, signaling the volume’s concerns with disguise, hybridity, identity, and many kinds of transgression, some destructive and others empowering.
To call any of these poems “narrative” isn’t true to their complexity, yet the first section of Fablesque is the most story-driven, often through a focus on animal fables. As in Marianne Moore’s animal poems, which Hong references, Hong’s beasts reveal human traits through vivid particularity, like botanical drawings in language. The termite queen has a “slick abdomen the color of tea” while a blackbird’s eye is “open and unmoving like a dab of gray-black roe” (take that, Wallace Stevens). This close observation might seem inhospitable to allegory, but Hong blurs human and nonhuman identities with a deft hand. A mother bear’s fur is “matted with bat droppings and four-month-old honey,” but she also accidentally swallows a few of her babies “like regret,” and when she cleans the rest, she “licks off the first skin to reveal another: soft black hair like an Asian baby’s.” By the end of “Bear,” the mother animal talks to her cub about “thwarted ambitions,” transforming into a fallible human parent.
The fables Hong reworks often concern parents who injure children. In “Snow Goose,” a mother puts a young girl into a glass carriage in which she will be raped by a “beast”—a monster who is also a family member—and then refuses to see the damage the girl suffers. In an adjoining poem, “Blue Morpho,” Hong notes “there was never an apology” and therefore dedicates this poem to “the shattered / instant. You were the right child in the wrong / alley.” She parses conventional wisdom about forgiving and forgetting, powerfully reconfiguring a commonly felt ambivalence:
I don’t believe it for a second. I believe
what happened happened to a form that persists
within my dismantled adult, my vertical eye
that won’t forget. Forgetfulness is for the dead
returning to the living, not for the living
on the way to death.Wisdom says the way out is empathy: hearing
the suffering of the man as he cuts you
a new mouth.
Where Hong lands is not spiritual, but practical: “Today, I speak / another version: a sensible goal / for a person.” Her bestiary is ultimately a means to recovery of personhood, by any story that works. Traumas link to each other over time in a terrible chain; behind every bad story is another bad story. They can also interlock within single creatures. The amazing “Siren,” for instance, stakes out the intersections of colonialism and misogyny, politics and myth. Hong’s version of the mythological bird-woman is “Partitioned like a nation” and declares that “Having a voice demands / constant reparation.” Wonderfully, this anthem is also funny. Setting out with the legal question “Cui bono?” the siren moves on to “Goals for a Monday: / rip out the knees of the patriarchy / —practice histrionic but alluring singing / —do laundry.” Wild shifts in tone and diction are another way Hong refuses to adhere to anybody’s program.
Formally, Fablesque is just as unpredictable, encompassing a pun-stuffed ballad, prose poetry, sonnets, and free verse with shifty margins. Part two, for example, contains a sequence of prose and free verse poems about architecture, in which a sealed crack, in a different kind of fable, can serve “as an allegory for the inscrutable, compliant nature of all those dark-haired people in other lands.” Even in prose poetry, though, Hong is an intensely lyric writer—this book feels driven by sound almost as by idea, suggesting a parallel between thematic and oral echoes, as if rhyme itself might be a variety of allusion.
The sonnets in the book’s third section, revisiting fairy tales with an emphasis on eros, offer a virtuoso’s array of sound effects. Hong’s end rhymes can be ingeniously anagrammatic and comic—payola / halo, emo / jello—but she is just as deft with internal rhyme, deconstructing and reconstructing language’s constituent parts. “Late Caesura,” for instance, sutures apology and imperative, intimacy and opposition, with a series of em-dashes, closing with “damn sobriquet—brick it. Break.” Is that a command to self to break up with a person, or with ambivalence itself? Despite her skill as a storyteller, Hong seems to have limited faith in revelation, being too aware of how language and story structures carry more associations than any writer can control.
I don’t want to descend into poststructuralist rhapsody, not just because it’s irritating but because Hong’s investigations feel more cognitive than theoretical. The sonnets, especially, keep returning to perception and how brains categorize and process input. A large part of how people change is by telling themselves stories about how they are changing. Playing with possibilities helps a person imagine new ways to be. Fablesque is too surreal to constitute a manual for metamorphosis, but it creates valuable space for thinking about what keeps happening to us and, despite time’s circularity, what can—improbably, astonishingly—become new.