The Brooklyn Rail on Jennifer Soong's Probing Near, At

For the February issue of the Brooklyn Rail, Chris Campanioni reviews poems by Jennifer Soong, as published in her debut, Near, At (Futurepoem Books, 2019). "In language that is lyrical and dense, stuttering and elegant, playful and probing," writes Campanioni, "Soong joins a coterie of writers as expansive as her first collection—rubbing up against [Mina] Loy’s vibrant aphorisms on Futurism that presaged Modernism’s inquiries into self-alienation ... as well as the disappearing acts of self-erasure that suggest Surrealism’s endeavor of infinite arrivals." More:

Soong’s gaze, too, is less documentarian than promiscuous and probing—the transit(ion) to the Dominican Republic (“Winter Vacation At Punta Cana”) presents her an opportunity to ruminate, for instance, on “the statistics of/corporate retreat/passive-aggression” and the made-up notion of a stress-free experience, all of this prefaced with an itemization of the parts of the body and the objects of the home, a conflation that implies that the objectified body and the bodily objects of everyday life encounter each other in the moments of pre-arrival: the “scene of the crash” and its inevitable grasping.

“For the body really/does end,” she writes, pages later, “so wondrously/in the crowd that it/snaps back/into what space/contracts and grows overly magnetic” (“For Oli Browne and the Protests of Early 2017”). If modernity introduced the debasement of literally getting lost in the crowd, the effect of the metropolis’s intensification of nervous stimulation, as Georg Simmel theorized at the turn of the 20th-century, then Soong’s work is to reclaim this collective anonymity for its phatic, creative, and political uses—not to bow down to the money economy but to reinvest it with pleasure, an inward-facing practice that the poet articulates jubilantly across Near, At’s back cover: “DIFFERING FROM LIKABILITY, PLEASURE remains our ONE HOPE for A LIFE that is NOT DEFINED BY NECESSITY but by ITS EXCEEDING of it.” Soong’s inward-facing practice has aims, too, which exceed the individual and sketch out a composite language for collective growth, as evidenced by the closing lines of “For Oli Browne and the Protests of Early 2017”...

Find the rest of this detailed review at the Brooklyn Rail.