Lily Hoang's A Bestiary Reviewed at Full Stop
At Full Stop, Darren Huang reviews A Bestiary (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2016), the much-admired collection of essays by poet Lily Hoang. "Hoang follows multiple arcs, often abutting rewritten fairy tales with scenes of daily life, impressions, abbreviated dialogue, and revelatory details. Her singular, impressionistic mode of expression uncoils multiple themes with poetic economy," Huang writes. More:
The collection’s title is a wink at the centrality of myth, fairy tale, and legend to Hoang’s strategy in narration — a feminist rereading and interrogation of canonized fables. “On Measurement” suggests that the modern definition of time has developed from certain Western traditions at the expense of other approaches. The tale of Prince Charming and Sleeping Beauty is revisited as a story of reawakening and then questioned for its implication that a woman’s rebirth might have required male intervention: “When Charming arrives, she is gone. She has already been saved, a season ago. Leaves gather on branches, resolute.” It is easy to dream of independence and the resistance of domesticity but in reality, the puzzle of female dependency remains irresoluble. Her advances toward freedom always falter — the source of which remains the question toward and from which these essays both drift and recoil.
Facetiously, Hoang writes of her current ruinous relationship, one occasioned by infidelities on both sides: “I justify seeing him because I like our story.” Always there is this love of the tidy narrative with its happy coincidences, its aligned orbits, and easy categorization of victors and losers. Of course, the conditions of life forbid such rosiness. Though one supposes that mere pining should do no harm, there is a point when all this measuring up becomes masochistic, when her life is at risk of becoming a sort of eulogy for another, an interminable mourning for what could have happened, for the life not chosen.
On the surface, this is a haphazard approach to narrative construction without much linear logic. Arcs are often abruptly broken only to be resumed in later essays. Doubts over the writing process frequently intrude: “The people in my every day life who don’t make it into these essays: why? What induces inclusion?” Uncertainty over the project and a dithering between truth-telling and dissembling are constants: “This essay already feels too honest, I’ll publish it anyway: I am not worth a nickel of shame.” There is a consistent quality of jaggedness, as when associated memories are conjured through the most incidental of connections: “When I peel pomegranates, tenderness for my ex-husband strikes me like the release of venom.”
Find the full review at Full Stop.