May 15, 2017 Issue

Mai Der Vang’s and Airea D. Matthews’s Striking Débuts

Vang’s “Afterland” and Matthews’s “Simulacra” are remarkable, virtuosic collections from young poets.

In “Afterland,” Vang deploys a rationed vocabulary to wondrous effect.Illustration by Charlie Gentle

The Hmong-American poet Mai Der Vang’s début volume, “Afterland” (Graywolf), reminds us what a distinctive instrument the human imagination is, no matter what tune it plays. There is a story in this book, and an important one: Vang’s family fled Laos at the close of the Laotian “secret war,” when the C.I.A. armed the Hmong people to fight against the occupying North Vietnamese. Laos fell, the C.I.A. pulled up stakes, and many Hmong families, after languishing in refugee camps in Thailand and elsewhere, were resettled in places like Fresno, California, where Vang lives today. Vang is among the first generation of Hmong-Americans born here and writing in English. She has no firsthand memory of the trauma that shaped her. These ironies, not a little bitter, sponsor her work.

Vang writes strikingly, often chillingly visual poems, their images projected one at a time, like slides in a lecture, or perhaps in a trial. A woman is dragged “bleeding / by her long black hair,” her child’s “head in the rice / pounder, shell-crumbled.” The poems can feel like environments rather than narratives: they develop according to our wary movement through them, simultaneously registering both our outward point of view and our inner commentary. Here are the opening stanzas of “Water Grave,” about a river crossing:

We cross under
the midnight shield
and learn that bullets

can curse the air.
A symposium
of endangered stars

evicts itself to
the water. Another
convoy leaves the kiln.

The line breaks here represent the fear of what we’ll encounter next along the poem’s low-lying, cramped horizontal axis, with bullets “cursing” the air overhead and stars reflected on the water below. Inside, where the mind makes comparisons and analogies, the dissociation inheres in malfunctioning metaphors: what is a “symposium / of endangered stars” and how would it evict itself? The illogic evokes, on the page, the damaged conditions for thinking which burden these “creatures of the Mekong,” their “heads bobbing” like “ghosts without bodies” in a “river yard / of amputated hearts.”

Vang’s poems are sometimes woven with Hmong phrases, which, to the reader who lacks the language, give the impression of chatter arriving by a remote, staticky broadcast. “Light from a Burning Citadel” counterpoints its eerie, ancestral first-person voice with a part-Hmong chorus:

Now I am a Siamese rosewood on fire.
I am a skin of sagging curtain.
I am a bone of bullet hole.
I am locked in the ash oven of a forest.

Peb yog and we will be.

A note tells us that peb yog means “we are.” The English syntax seems to approximate Hmong phrasing: its metamorphosis from another language, like the brutal self-transformations it expresses, is costly, ultimate, but also definitive.

“Afterland” works its wonders with an intentionally rationed vocabulary, its counters combined and recombined in poem after poem: stars, water, hair, bones, fire. To invest this elemental grammar with such feeling is to play a game, mastered by poets from Du Fu to Louise Glück, that reminds us that the contents of the world are finite, and that the imagination obtains, often, only in combination. The style creates an atmosphere of impending marvels, and many of Vang’s poems perform, in words, the transformations that they describe:

In the dove tree
Corrals of your hair,

A scaffold ascends
The perfumed winter

Where frost has hewn
You into azalea.

“Azalea” is a beautiful word in any context, but in this stark verbal landscape it stands out like the garish shrub it denotes, here reduced to its bare winter interest.

The restraint of these poems in part reflects Hmong languages’ resistance to script; many appear to have existed for centuries without any written record. The most common script among Hmong speakers today was invented in the nineteen-fifties, by Christian missionaries. It uses the Roman alphabet, but clumsily, and with many critical effects of sound lost on the page. Around the same time, a farmer named Shong Lue Yang was said to have been taught a script, the Pahawh Hmong, by messengers from God. He attracted many followers before he was killed, a suspected insurgent, in 1971. Here are the crucial middle stanzas from a poem I believe will be read and taught widely, “Mother of People Without Script”:

Paj is not pam is not pab.
Blossom is not blanket is not help.

Ntug is not ntuj is not ntub.
Edge is not sky is not wet.

On sheet of bamboo
with indigo branch.

To txiav is not the txias.
To scissor is not the cold.

When Vang reads the Hmong words aloud (you can hear her do so on the Poetry Foundation’s Web site), they sound, to me, nearly identical; and yet when you see them the distinctions are clear. Every poem is different, by a little or by a lot, when it is read aloud. Here that gap, and all the clashes of culture and power it embodies, is in fact the subject of the poem, which adopts the rote tone of a language primer.

“Afterland” is, I think, two books. The one I have been describing, holding itself to its own stringent vision of verbal beauty, is among the most satisfying débuts by an American poet in some time. The book inside this book, much shorter, is replete with poignant snapshots of immigrant life; in these poems, Vang is looser, her language less monitored, the tension allayed by humor and wisdom. I like these poems slightly less. In “Matriarch,” a grandmother watches Sylvester Stallone on TV and thinks of “a man omitted,” likely a casualty of war:


She points at the television as if she could translate
Rocky, make sense of Rambo. She is camphor blouse,

Grandmother, keeper of jars for flamed cuppings.

This kind of parallelism—a current or slightly outré tic of M.F.A. workshops—always puts more weight on the second verb, and “makes sense of” is too weak to stand up to the pressure. A poetry that has elsewhere excavated its language from the communal unconscious has a hard time adopting the mode of personal anecdote. We miss the concentration, the narrowing and zooming attention to language, and, weirdly, the white space of her finest poems. A lot of silence goes into such work, if you listen carefully for it.

Airea D. Matthews is this year’s winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, judged by Carl Phillips. Her work is formalist, but she doesn’t write often in the forms we associate with poetry. Fugues, text messages to the dead, imagined outtakes from Wittgenstein, tart mini-operas, fairy tales: Matthews is virtuosic, frantic, and darkly, very darkly, funny. “Simulacra” (Yale), her first collection, doesn’t feel like an anthology of distractions or novelties. When a fine poet moves through such a variety of forms, she becomes, with every new obstacle, more herself, more aligned against accident. “We need change of objects,” Emerson wrote. With prowess of this magnitude, relaxing the ingenuity would mean ruin.

Of the book’s several lares and penates (Baudrillard, Barthes, and others make memorable cameos), the most important is Anne Sexton, the American confessional poet, who died, a suicide, in 1974. Hers is a story often understood to be about corrosive and largely self-inflicted domestic ennui. Matthews first plants this theme in a prose poem, part David Lynch and part Brothers Grimm, “The Mine Owner’s Wife.” A man comes home, opens his mouth, and a canary flies out; soon he slices his tongue open and bleeds into his wife’s goblet. “And, this, every single night” is Matthews’s deadpan punch line.

A series of poems imagines text exchanges between Sexton and a variety of correspondents, in a range of bizarre settings. They read like Virgilian eclogues in the age of autocorrect. All the disorientations of texting remain in place: we can’t be certain who’s saying what, and messages sometimes arrive jumbled, rushed, and in the wrong order. Here are the final three messages in a poem about suburban anomie, “Quiet Desperation Texts Sexton on Independence Day”:

FRI., AUG. 2, 6:41 AM
(2/2) around the block.
Fewer asses not tweaked,
twerked or fatted, yet
all that holds back a soul?
Chalkcage withering under
wrinkled corsets

FRI., AUG. 2, 6:39 AM
Every here
same cawing crows,
same ruined perches.

FRI., AUG. 2, 6:38 AM
(1/2) Same old hoes in fresh loam
and the bald cockold who drags
his tucked wife’s fat dog
while he jogs

The two columns form a harmonized lament between women that exposes, even as it patches over, differences in time, place, privilege, and race. The out-of-order texting suggests the ways that poets disobey temporal rules, treating their long-dead predecessors as collaborators. Matthews is reimagining poetry’s ancient function to connect the living to the dead, to engage with the past as an active, boisterous presence. “It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,” Whitman wrote. Poets, after all, have always known how to trick death with irresistible texts. ♦