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flinch and air
Laura Jane Lee
Out-Spoken Press: 2021
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This is a vociferous volume: not as in noisy or brash, but as in voice-carrying. It’s based on a bricolage of voices, sometimes the poet’s own, sometimes her evocation of others’ voices, sometimes transposing a documented record. They’re voices that shift from the elegiac to the lyrical, the anecdotal to the aphoristic, the ruminative to the polemical and reportage. Yet it’s a heterogeneity that circles and echoes from one voice to another. Bakhtin’s heteroglossia comes to mind, but only to highlight the poems’ scope and strength as they build to the final section’s ‘mothering the land’.

What’s being ‘mothered’ here—now directly, now obliquely—are laminate, fused layers of language, culture, politics and family. The collection is dedicated to the poet’s mother, and the first and longest section is a set of dramatic monologues about the poet’s maternal history, as Tang Chu Ching, who made her way from a farming village in Guangdong province to Hong Kong, which is where the poet was brought up and is the political site of the book’s closing section, where the ‘mothering’ is far from a comforting metaphor: the final two poems describe the physicality of the protests against the 2019 extradition bill.

• Tags: Hong Komg, Laura Jane Lee, Michael Freeman