sur vie
Youna Kwak
Fathom Books, 2020
Youna Kwak’s debut collection, sur vie, calls for a brazen ear to hear its Precambrian limbic music. Kwak’s poetry is like nothing being written today, rife with “black ruminations, creaking / musculature,” “warm jubilance,” “crowbar bones,” “fish-thick / skin” and other opaque, but strangely tactile luminous fluxes. To enter into a poem in sur vie is to be etherized, atomized, and transfigured, to experience something at once coolly mystical and hotly mammalian; as Kwak puts it in her poem, “Racoon”:
where you are is
incompleteness, blurred
enchantment in the center of the dance, where
eyes all wallow, socket-hungry.
Here, as elsewhere in sur vie, Kwak’s poetry scavenges and scans the lonely unknowing at the heart of human experience, overlaying the instinctual, the habitual, and the ultimately unnamable with intellection and lyric fire.
Kwak’s lyric fire unfolds in dialogue with the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet she directly invokes in the poem “Season of Bells’ Distant Flowering,” and whose presence shines like shook foil almost everywhere in this collection, as evidenced in the following stanza from “Waiting in the Garden”:
Were you smote to stillness by the object
or did desire strike first? Fixing
later on its locus, sudden gleam of light
amongst the brambles. The fat plum, lazy dangle.
Interestingly, Kwak’s poetry reverses the inscape of the objects in the world it apprehends, unmooring those objects from their particularity and, in the process, unselving speaker and listener alike (blurred enchantment in the center of the dance). Everywhere in this poetry, the image comes first, but the image is “an image of ardor / unchecked, spilling / vines from the cabinet.” This spillage, this lyric enactment of the fungibility of all things, leads inevitably back to a contemplation of the body (what Hopkins called “mortal trash”) as corpse and container of a corpus of language (The Word made flesh—the What that will fall to the residuary worm). In some of the most memorable lines from sur vie, Kwak writes: “My mouth is cut to the likeness of / God, and instructs the newborn / in me.”
Ultimately, though, sur vie contemplates survival, this life we live and try in vain to make sense of, in all its estranging detachment and its thrumming intimacies. Youna Kwak’s poetry, “moonbitten, lit, a tatter of telegrams,” counters what Pound called “the tyranny of the unimaginative.” sur vie deserves to be widely read because it enacts the curious balm of a deeper knowledge in a time (like any other time) of so many superficial ways of knowing. Assuredly, despite a wider uncertainty, Kwak holds out her hand to us and sings: “In appreciation I will persist with you.”
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