Focal Point

Jenny Qi opens her debut collection with the poem “Point at Which Parallel Waves Converge & From Which Diverge,” a heartbroken elegy for her mother, who died of cancer in 2011. The title comes from the optical definition of “focal point,” and establishes the project as one of layers, at the center of which is the poet’s grief. Qi is a cancer researcher who finds herself professionally entangled in her mother’s illness, and the opening poems juxtapose the intensity of studying and lab work with the agony of a loved one’s slow, incremental death:

I should be reading about telomeres―

how they guard the ends of chromosomes
and wane with every breath we take,
leaving fragments of ourselves behind.

For Qi, the process of grieving includes a visit from her mother’s ghost; her own lashing out in anger; and an all-consuming sense of existential emptiness: “There are days when the ground looks too close. / I think I can fold myself smaller / and smaller.” But she also finds room to consider her larger surroundings. There are romantic love poems, descriptions of her home in San Francisco, and politically oriented works that wrestle with the racist slurs and other abuses she faces as an Asian American, and that reflect on tragedies such as the shooting in the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. While the political poems often feel thematically separate from Qi’s main project in this collection, they nevertheless evince a frenzied search for meaning that underscores the enormity of the poet’s sorrow, and that sometimes yields profound insights: “To cure a thing / is to remove it from time.”