“Focal Point: poems” by Jenny Qi

Jenn Qi (photo: Yizhen Dong)

This ambitious first poetry collection deals confessionally with the loss of scientist and poet Jenny Qi’s mother and her own childhood, loss of lovers and friends, ecology, racism and her mixed heritage. There is no fixed focal point linking poems sequentially; a narrative chronology threads the work instead.

After an initial poem exploring the meanings of the collection’s title, the first stand out is “First Spring 2011”, where several of the above concerns appear:

 

Everyone I love is dead or dying.
The sun shines garishly bright.
The ice is melting. Things are growing.
Birds are fucking in the sky.
It’s too cold and too warm,
and the earth keeps turning.

 

Focal Point, Jenny Qi (Steel Toe Books, October 2021)
Focal Point, Jenny Qi (Steel Toe Books, October 2021)

Qi is direct and to the point as doctors have to be (Qi is a medical doctor), in detailing her mother’s death and other losses; she says things as they are. These statements put the reader on an emotional rollercoaster, formed of life and death contrasts. Sky and bodies, cold and warm; humorous and grave; polarities swing the imagined experience from one extreme to another. At thirty, Qi is a young poet who has come through a lot.

Postcards From the Living is a powerful evocation of the poet’s deceased mother and Qi’s efforts to revive her imaginally, against scientific laws:

 

Remember world history class, how I translated
lectures to you each night, partly to practice,

 

partly to keep you with me. Every day,
there’s so much new I want to show you,

 

like the spongy tang of injera, pork belly
banh mi melting like butter on the tongue,

 

all these places I have traveled without you
so I can forget how without you I am.

 

Another convention is being stretched here in terms of simplicity and directness. This syntactically awkward line—“so I can forget how without you I am”—carries the conversational strength of expression that could have come from a random street interviewee indifferent to “poetry”.

 

Transplant is an aptly medical title for Qi’s mixed-heritage experience. She weighs in here on overt racism:

 

Friday night in San Francisco,
the fog a cold wall boxing me in,
insular contempt driving me out.

 

      Get out of our city. Go back
              to where you came from.
              Techie scum. Chink.

 

Never mind that chinks like me
built this city, dusted its hills
and creaky trains with their bones,
painted bridges with their blood.

 

The protagonist not knowing whether she’s in or out is a recurring question here, rooted in bewilderment.

Qi’s take on her racial heritage continues in “About Face”:

 

                My parents’ scoff, you will always have
a Chinese face. This impersonal rage familiar and foreign as home.

 

Like my last childhood house. The only place we lived
for more than a year. Everything white like a hospital sheet,
so empty and quiet I whispered when friends came over.

 

I’d wanted to paint my bedroom walls a color, any color,
but my parents said no, they’d just have to be repainted
when we move. They kept plastic on the sofa for protection;

 

It ends with the rhetorical question:

 

How could I have forgotten not to be comfortable.

 

Form as well as poetic language plays a central role briefly, the disjointed typography of “How Men Deal” reflecting difficulties with the poet’s father:

 

               men
burn down ashes to ashes     are all ash and hurt

 

“Virgin” reflects different hurts with a man, exploring typography further as empathic frame, while “Brother” gets more conventionally poetic:

 

 

 

Qi’s poetry is marked throughout by a steady eloquence which comes to touching fruition in Radiation; its final image arriving like one of Mary Oliver’s wild birds to open into collective catharsis:

 

What use is brilliance
if I can’t direct those beams
at renegade cells, particles
eroding memories
of her keys on the counter,
lullabies she once sang,
our early morning strolls
by the pond where a crane once
walked into its reflection.

 

At other points Qi’s fevered language and mixed metaphors push our minds through synaesthetic whirls. This one, for example, in “Sometimes I remember”:

 

sleepless reading your words over
and over, letting black ink
melt me kaleidoscopic.

 

Dear Steve, however, ends with cliché:

 

I will tell him he’s been born into
a world that’s not afraid of love.

 

Poetry’s range expands given the growing generational divide in its published authors. That last line may read as facile for readers over thirty-five, say, while many millennials given to Instagram poetry may uphold it (Qi wrote Focal Point as a young PhD student; her mother died when she was nineteen). Other images in the same poem stray into banality:

 

               the kind of love
that sends your lion heart through blazing hoops
and rushes into your arteries faster than light

 

Similarly, the ending of the poemBrother” comes up against that risk faced by all plain-speaking poets—of treading close to platitude, relying on emotion. It seems boundariless; I felt awkward reading this, like an intruder:

 

I like to think you would have understood me
when I was so lost without our mother.

 

We could have been lost together.

 

One senses the balance shifting as to how personal confessional poetry should be; a balance which spoken word and Instagram poets, along with mainly page poets such as Qi, Ocean Vuong and Cyril Wong (Singapore), contest.

In contrast, Qi returns to form with “Commonalities”, which is measured:

 

I remember how it felt to reach
for comfort and fail and keep failing,
sometimes fall so low you want
to pull someone else with you.

 

The shift between “fail” and “fall” enacts a disquieting onomatopoeia for the reader, Qi reflecting on the Pulse Nightclub shooting (Orlando, Florida, June 2016). The poet relates that she had frequented the club, as had the perpetrator.

Likewise, the poem “Magnificent Things” works from simple metaphorical statements:

 

I wept as the clock ticked
forward, burning moment
down to memory. It was always
a ghost in the making.

 

The same poem ends:

 

In the dark, I rehearse
my slow waltz with loss.
I know the steps by heart.

 

The waltz image chimes with “this body that is always two steps back” in the next poem, the delightfully evocative “First Spring, 2020”.

 

Qi’s synesthetic eloquence is on a roll as the end of the collection nears. She conveys a delicate fragility further on in the same poem, via internal rhymes and alliteration:

 

               I can conjure
the memory of pink petals lining sidewalks,

 

bursting from branches so thin I wonder
can they teach us how to hold this weight.
The light is so bright and cold. I remember

 

this light, the dissonance of grief in the spring

 

At the end of this poem grief brings Qi back to the body, source of grounding in her daily career and arguably a focal point throughout the collection:

 

A knot blooms in my stomach,
a bitterness bubbling up my throat.

 

The high point of the collection comes in breathless passages in “When This is all Over”, which  brush conventional logic aside with celebratory sweeps of syntax:

 

the heron walking into the pond,
small white reflection
emerging from the verdure,
so lush it brushes the sky teal;
bees floating from poppy
to lupine to cobweb thistle,
tender hum and churn
like waves lapping the shore
like language like love so certain
how could it be any other way?

 

The absence of a comma after “language” or punctuation after “certain” only serves to heighten the growing passion. It ends in high spirits:

 

& at the end squinting into the bright
ocean, once described by the Greeks
as wine, because they didn’t have words
for the color blue or there wasn’t yet blue
or maybe they were drunk
off its immensity

 

The placement of poems in a collection is itself a poem of sorts; credit to Qi for saving a big hitter for the end. The final poem, “Contingencies”, comprises large, cosmic brushstrokes.
 

Everywhere somewhere is burning and it’s too late to look back.

 

The use of ‘Everywhere somewhere’ has a positively disorienting effect; the mood builds further:

 

I wake up in the dark smell smoke
so familiar I don’t think twice.

 

Qi returns to the ineffable:

 

it could not be measured, the scale
of these days beyond conceiving—

 

how the ancients imagined us,
what it means to be immeasurable.

 

Qi’s infinite scope recalls those other exploratory Americans: the beatniks, Jim Morrison even, and his better colleague in poetry Michael McClure. Her relative youth may well signal more startling work to come.

Focal Point’s last line extends Whitmanesque, to identify with the cosmos:

 

I would be the mountain and the stars—
be that immovable and that transient.

Lawrence Pettener is a poet and editor living in Subang Jaya, Malaysia.