As a child, I went to extremes.
Are you listening, are you listing?
The constructions we know of
holiness and madness converged
only later. Ambulances are cradled
and dolls go to war for the same
reason the word elegy appears
so often in poems…
From “Shakeout”
Cindy Juyoung Ok’s Ward Toward, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, is a meditative and haunting debut that confronts occupation, institutionalization, and anti-Asian violence with unflinching honesty. Ok is particularly skilled at enjambment, a technique that effectively resists the container of the line in much the same way that Ok continually writes against containment, physically and ideologically, throughout the collection. In addition to her mastery of the individual line, Ok also proves innovative and equally adept at subverting expectations for what a poem can or should do, challenging formal and material constraints through “Before the DMZ,” “The Orders,” and a pair of poems sharing the title “Home Ward,” among others.
Ok signals her interrogation of the poem and its function within the first few lines of the collection, waxing meta-poetic as the speaker in “Three Act Comedy” declares, “Bone by Bone, this poem erases adjectives–green,/harsh, infinite–and their stains. It becomes a student/of waiting…” Ok also uses the poem to establish a core theme, the fetishization of colonial violence against Asian women, which opens with the speaker challenging, “How dare you question my Eastern mystical status,/which I earned with bells the moon will never hear.”
“Orientation,” the second poem in the collection, trades on the double entendre of the title and its allusion to Said’s Orientalism to simultaneously critique the literal confinement of a childhood friend and the confines of Asian stereotypes. The friend asks the speaker “what//the outside is like,” to which she responds, “the birds/sound more and more//like car alarms.” As the poem continues, the speaker returns to the image of bells, which Ok has already coded as Eastern, arguing that “Attitudes/toward bells are proportional/to proximity.” The poem closes with another turn toward the meta-poetic in which “the teenagers’//eyes widen and their/grammar shrinks. Form outlives/us, but barely.”
The assertion that form persists, if only slightly, beyond the self helps to contextualize Ok’s own affair with formalism. “Before the DMZ” is a concrete poem written in the shape of Korea, split into two stanzas separated by a thin line of white space. The author’s arrangement forces readers to become migrants, to cross from one space into another in order to access the complete narrative, a visual allusion to the fractured lineage and history described elsewhere in the collection. “The Orders” presents eleven quatrains, each one with a set of numbered lines. Ok does not give readers any particular hint as to how they might read the poem, though Rae Armantrout’s introduction to the collection offers two: linearly, or by reading the numbered lines in order (reading all line 1s, then all line 2s, etc.). I would add that there are several other options, such as a chronological-numerical reading (line 1 of the first stanza, line 2 of the second stanza, etc.). Remarkably, I tried four or five different approaches to reading “The Orders,” and every attempt produced a technically sound, coherent, and yet unique experience.
While I was enchanted with Ok’s mastery of received and invented forms, it bears noting that Ok is equally masterful at turns of phrase, particularly as relates to her critiques of raced and sexed violence. “Ward of One,” for example, describes a speaker who is “Confined by a lease with a beloved man/who declared again and again that he waved/the kitchen knife toward me not to gash…” The speaker later admits, “When he wished me dead I whispered to/myself the word lucky, reminded myself/I was, because my parents at least//wanted me to live.”
Ok employs the same simple yet profound language to address targeted violence outside the home. “Nap Plot” alludes to a mass stabbing, the speaker acknowledging, “We knew well we would be dead soon./Being contained was one thing, but the end/of the breath would be notable, new.” Here again, Ok nods to the poem itself as container—readers must contend whether or not “the end/of the breath” points toward the function of the line, perhaps punctuation, or even the finality implied by the last line of the poem.
“In Atlanta” invokes a mass shooting in Atlanta wherein the shooter targeted Asian women at two spas and a massage parlor. Again, the speaker abruptly and matter-of-factly admits, “Last week I heard shooting and massage;/in the instant of hearing knew, then said/all that had not yet been reported,” before again explicitly invoking form, this time an image of test forms. Returning to that opening argument that “Form outlives us,/but barely,” readers are privy to the precision with which Ok sets up her commentary on the inescapable, inevitable violence against Asian women, situating the poem as elegy to the dead and dying.
Ward Toward is an immensely complex collection that far exceeds what I expect from a debut. Cindy Juyoung Ok is one of the most exciting new voices in recent memory. This is a collection you will want to read, and read again.