“Unearthings” by Wendy Chen (GP7)
Book Review by Patrick Thornton
From its opening lines, Unearthings insists the reader becomes aware of both a personal and collective body. Wendy Chen’s debut collection of poetry, published by Tavern Books, focuses on the physical and the supernatural; what is seen and what is felt; the unnerving proposition that we never truly escape who and where we come from. Chen journeys from modern New England to Mao Zedong’s China and back, tracking the lives of family, lovers, and women whose lives often echo and inform Chen’s own experience.
It was a delight to become reacquainted with Chen’s writing, having published several poems from this collection in Issue 7 of Ghost Proposal. In those poems we’re acquainted with Chen’s haunting interpretation of Madame Butterfly, a well-known figure that Chen crafts into a three-dimensional woman. We see in these poems Chen’s comparison of a woman’s body to physical objects. In one poem we see a woman’s body as a house. Here, we see it as an appliance. Chen writes:
see how neatly her organs are arranged
on built-in plastic shelving.
Her real mouth also is here.
These unsettling yet vivid descriptions are a hallmark of Chen’s writing that keep the reader on their toes, and in a constant assessment of the body, and how bodies are used.
Unearthings also plays a good deal with time, moving from Chen’s present-day experiences, to her grandmother’s life in China. In They Sail Across the Mirrored Sea, Chen reflects on the atrocities of war in 1940s and 60s China, while also noting the small wonders of daily life. Chen’s grandmother contemplates the lives of shrimp harvested from the sea, the net coming down on them, A fibrous constellation pulled out of the sky. Chen makes even the simple complex without ever getting mired down by overly complicated language.
Chen deftly uses the epistolary form at various points in the collection, particularly in poems like Memorial where Chen writes to Chinese poet Li Qingzhao, who wrote under the name Yi’an during the Song dynasty. Li Quingzhao reappears at different points, much like Madame Butterfly and Chen’s ancestors. In her direct address to the famous poet Chen writes:
it has been almost a thousand years
since you last walked on top of the city wall.
Still, I follow you, doggedly,
And each year the snow melts on my face
the same way it did yours.
This passage acts as a prime example of the way Chen shows the reader how our lives continuously overlap with those who came before us, no matter how many hundreds of years might exist between us.
Woven between the narratives of family and history is Chen’s own love story, divided into five parts. Fastened I-V encapsulates the complications of loving someone with an illness, someone who has been hurt. I was struck by the simple brilliance of the line, You wanted to forget./You told me to remember. To me this line sums up the difficulties faced in writing personal and family narrative. The messiness of remembering, the ease of forgetting, but ultimately knowing things have to be put a little out of place for their true meaning to be revealed.
Whether writing as herself, her family, her lover, or any of the myriad players who make up Unearthings, Chen’s poems are lived experiences and lived-in experiences. There’s a sincerity that echoes through each line that draws the reader in, while also leaving them in a certain state of wonder.
The collection will have you linger in that wonder and make you want to experience, question, and journey with it again and again. Let Chen wrap you in silk, take you forward, take you back, take you to these places you never knew you wanted to go.
Unearthings, Wendy Chen. Tavern Books. Winner of the 2017 Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series. http://www.tavernbooks.com/books/unearthings
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