{"id":17368,"date":"2021-12-01T00:01:19","date_gmt":"2021-12-01T06:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/?p=17368"},"modified":"2022-03-28T15:27:25","modified_gmt":"2022-03-28T20:27:25","slug":"focal-point-poems-by-jenny-qi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/archives\/17368","title":{"rendered":"Focal Point: Poems by Jenny Qi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Focal Point\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>Steel Toe Books, October 2021)
\n<\/span>Reviewed by Kiyoko Reidy<\/span><\/p>\n

Science and poetry are closer than they appear. Jenny Qi\u2019s debut collection\u2014and winner of the Steel Toe Books 2020 Poetry Award\u2014forges that connection. A haunting constellation of loss, dreams, violence, landscape, and spoken language springs from the mind of a scientist willing to question the things that resist answers: death, the capriciousness of power, the uncertainty of knowledge. Science and poetry both express a love of truth\u2014science seeks to possess the truth, whereas poetry waits for it to speak. Qi wrestles with this in the book\u2019s opening poem, \u201cPOINT AT WHICH PARALLEL WAVES CONVERGE & FROM WHICH DIVERGE\u201d: the final lines read, \u201cI think how cruelly futile all this \/ erratically focused empathy, how brutal \/ to learn why I couldn\u2019t save \/ what I couldn\u2019t save.\u201d<\/p>\n

Focal Point<\/em> is divided into four numbered sections after the opening poem. Grief whistles a clear note throughout all four sections\u2014fueled by racism, mass shootings, a brother who could have been, and, most centrally, the death of a mother. The book begins with the mother in her final moments\u2014the first poem in the first section is titled \u201cTHE LAST VISITATION\u201d\u2014and ends with what life looks like after the loss of a parent\u2014a poem in the final section is titled \u201cDREAMING OF MY MOTHER FIVE YEARS LATER.\u201d Between these two poems is not a chronological progression through grief, but a meandering journey that moves both forward and backward through time that mirrors the nonlinear experience of grief.<\/p>\n

Qi\u2019s scientific eye provides a lens through which the world is again made strange and new. I am not a scientist\u2014in fact, the world of science often feels inaccessible to me these days. Yet, it is Qi\u2019s clear voice and how she turns her eye toward moments of tender humanity that creates a book full of doors into this world. In \u201cTELOMERES & A 2 AM (LOVE) POEM,\u201d there is both a quick science lesson and a confession that \u201cI might tolerate\/like\/love you.\u201d Situated in a late-night study session, this scientific love poem is both smart and welcoming, hesitant and tender. In \u201cTRANSPLANT,\u201d Qi turns to scientific metaphor as a way of processing racism in San Francisco. She writes, \u201cI don\u2019t need you to remind me \/ I\u2019m not from around here. \/ A transplant \/ that won\u2019t take, like the first \/ foreign \/ hearts \/ rejected by the body \/ before scientists learned \/ how to make them beat \/ as if they always belonged.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ease with which Qi\u2019s scientific knowledge is blended into her poems is a reminder that we all live in a world of processes, that things live and die around and within us all the time. The four poems that include \u201cBIOLOGY LESSON (1-4)\u201d centers the death of cells\u2014first through want of touch, then from suffocation\u2014but also their almost-miraculous capacities. These short poems, three to four lines long, offer snippets of both the body\u2019s failures and its victories. \u201cBIOLOGY LESSON 2\u201d ends: \u201cEven the toughest \/ cells die wanting \/ room to breathe.\u201d By the time we make it to \u201cBIOLOGY LESSON 4,\u201d however, we receive a single sentence: \u201cFed the right factors, \/ cells can become anything\u2014 \/ molecular inspiration.\u201d These miniature poems, amidst the page\u2019s broad white space, could feel crushed by the expansive blankness. Instead, I see the poem asserting itself, insisting on its aliveness.<\/p>\n

The latter half of Focal Point<\/em> is rich with dreams. Dreams exist in the liminal space of reality\u2014so often they build off what we know, what is familiar, but then proceed to unravel it. In the book\u2019s third section, Qi pushes hard against some of the book\u2019s epistemologically-driven questions: what can we know, and how do we come to know it? To what degree does knowledge give us power over our own lives? In \u201cHABITS,\u201d Qi considers the way we physiologically construct certain kinds of knowing:<\/p>\n

Brain cells, like muscles, build<\/em>
\nconnections with repeated stimulation,<\/em>
\nletting memories scratch across<\/em>
\nuntil they live in the grooves.<\/em><\/p>\n

The more you remember, the deeper<\/em>
\nthe scratches, the more you remember<\/em>
\nuntil remembering is habit, like breathing<\/em>
\nor tying a butterfly knot in the dark.<\/em><\/p>\n

Darkness, too, is a habit\u2014ruminating<\/em>
\non sorrow until sorrow is easy<\/em>
\nas breathing\u2014<\/em>
\neasier.<\/em><\/p>\n

The body\u2019s muscle memory of how to tie a knot or do every step in the \u201cslow waltz with loss\u201d drives this book just as much as knowledge of brain cells. It is through the body that we know the certainty of darkness and the totality of sorrow, but it is also the way we begin to find our way out of that darkness. In \u201cMAGNIFICENT THINGS,\u201d a peacock flares its stunning tail: \u201cI watch the peacock turning, \/ a silent waltz in the grass \/ patterned tail fanned out, \/ waving like a skeleton hand. \/ How delicate the feathers, \/ tattered strings of a sail \/ struggling against the wind. \/ How flimsy their magnificence.\u201d Even in the glory of this moment, the skeletal hand\u2014death\u2014permeates the poem. Still, the feathers may be a tattered, flimsy sail\u2014but they are magnificent. In this, I see not a theatrical, movie-grade rebirth, but a chance at hope\u2014how, even during grief\u2019s cruel hours, beauty can emerge quietly in the magnificence of feathers.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Kiyoko Reidy is a poet from east Tennessee. Her poems and nonfiction have been published or are forthcoming in Creative Nonfiction<\/em> as a Sunday Short Read, Sugar House Review,<\/em> RHINO, Missouri Review<\/em> as a Poem of the Week, and elsewhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Focal Point\u00a0 (Steel Toe Books, October 2021) Reviewed by Kiyoko Reidy Science and poetry are closer than they appear. Jenny Qi\u2019s debut collection\u2014and winner of the Steel Toe Books 2020 Poetry Award\u2014forges that connection. A haunting constellation of loss, dreams, violence, landscape, and spoken language springs from the mind of a scientist willing to question […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2247,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[1,70],"tags":[55],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-4w8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17368"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2247"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17368"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17582,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17368\/revisions\/17582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}