Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, A Brief History of Fruit

In which I climb a tree, as a child, and find my
father’s initials about 16 feet off the ground

The season’s folding in Appalachia bearing witness
to a thousand slow implosions—
broad leaves falling like kneeling benches. An evenly knitted
blanket of maple and clay. In the canopy,
I am a small monkey, fiddling with the end of a stem
in wonder. Yes and no. The cooler reality
wears Keds and rustles slowly skywards. What we feel
when we discover something—expected or unexpected,
the temple you knew was somewhere within your reach or the pleasure
of a bittersweet drink—drives the colonial impulse. Our joy
is rigged.        C     F     A
Individual fault is a terrible entrée into any discussion about nostalgia.
Nevertheless, in the autumn, I search those worn-down mountains
for anything that has not changed,
for an ascension that I can halt, forgive me, by pressing hard with my hands.

The full-length debut by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, a poet and critic newly relocated from Maryland to Ottawa to teach at the University of Ottawa this fall, is A Brief History of Fruit (Akron OH: The University of Akron Press, 2020). A follow-up to the small volume, BETWEEN (Finishing Line Press, 2018), A Brief History of Fruit is a collection that writes on, as Diane Seuss writes in her blurb on the back cover, “history—personal, familial, postcolonial, geopolitical, ecological—and indeed the history of fruit, fruit as sustenance, pleasure, exploitable product, as image, parent, love, and wound.” Chosen by Seuss as the winner of the 2018 Akron Poetry Prize, A Brief History of Fruit uses fruit as a framework to articulate a space of the two perceived sides of the author’s cultural identity, as Andrews discusses as part of an interview with Jon Riccio, posted on The University of Arizona Poetry Center blog on August 19, 2020:

But the honest answer is this: when I started writing this book, what was guiding me was a fundamental confusion about what it meant to be me, culturally speaking. Racially speaking. In a world formed and destroyed by white supremacy, what does it mean to contain and embody whiteness alongside a racial identity that it has traditionally othered and exoticized? What does it mean to contain both of those things? One can see the difficulty inherent in this question just in the debates over terminology: identifiers like “mixed-race” and “half x” and all of the bi- and multi- prefixes reinforce a kind of blood-quantum reification of race, while terms like mestizx, for example, refer to very specific subsets of people. But what else are we to call ourselves? I am, and am not, Filipinx American. I am of two races, and yet I myself am one person. So this notion of how to name oneself is at the heart of the project. And even now in this answer, you can see the ways in which I am turning that fundamentally solipsistic argument (“what the hell am I anyway”) into one with obvious scholarly implications and roots. Part of this is because, as I’ve said elsewhere, the book went through two very distinct phases: an initial drafting phase, done a long time ago, in which my only real concern was portraying my family, capturing certain moments, certain places, certain relations between those things. The second phase was a rewrite of almost the entire book, undertaken much later and on the other side of a doctorate, in which I went back through the portraits and the stories and tried to force them outward, a bit, beyond my personal situation and into more conscious contact with extant discussions about the nature of whiteness and American colonialism. I learned, in that later phase, that (at least for me) successful poetry is more interpretation than expression, more analysis than anecdote. It’s what still guides me.

Andrews writes expansive, narrative lyrics that examine cultural legacies and identities surrounding produce, from politics to labour, and histories from both sides of her families, including her maternal grandfather’s stroke, varieties of light, questions around water, and the notion of “ethnic foods.” To end the poem “Acquired Taste,” she writes: “This is the part where I say // of course I like it now, that my life is sour and analogous foods / make me feel like weights clicking into the right place on a scale. // What I mean is that grief is nothing if not the inability to tell / and retell the beloved of their own significance.” Andrews articulates her narratives by stretching the lyric, staggering and even deconstructing her lines, such as the poem “How to Get Into a Poem,” that opens: “[A Startling observation about the nature of human life] / or [A concrete description of trout] / [Backstory, alluding to an individuating experience]” Her poems are expansive, opening a lyric of story and inquiry to get at the very heart. “I have wanted to explain certain things about the difference between the brain / and the body.” she writes, as part of the poem “Apostrophe.” To introduce the collection, Seuss writes:

            Despite the love that the speaker expresses, her realm is existential loneliness, and she owns it. “It turns out that any constellation    can lead you astray,” she writes, “that any sky    can ask you I’m sorry   do I know you.” Still, her poems do not spin in a cosmic fog. They are solidly placed. In Manila, where the rains are so persistent that “roofs become radios, the gray noise sweeping every    room with a broom made of profound differences.” On American rivers, “their greenish syntax letting all the silk / slip to the floor.” In her grandmother’s kitchen, “the aproned comma of my lola cleaning squid…the smell of the sea—the presence of death, / the preservation of salt—laying its net upon my face.” In an American hunting camp, “(w)hich is a man’s / place, a white man’s place. Which inheritance, / which ‘tradition,’ which deed marked 1804 stashed / in the floorboards. Which America.” These are hard-won poems, fought for, lived through. They do not resolve; to resolve would equal self-abandonment. Nor do they locate or repair the single center that will not hold. Instead they inventory a parallel history—“Raspberry, cherry, coconut, santol, passionfruit (dislike), apricot, lychee, mango, blueberry. So many different centers.” The history of fruit.