Christine Shan Shan Hou, the joy and terror are both in the swallowing

 

AMANUENSIS

            (after Françoise Gilot)

I imagine killing all the ants in my apartment with my smallest vibrator
I make them dance and shake, give them little seizures
Like my body when I come.
Submission is easiest when done alone.
I identify more with a doormat than a goddess.
A misfit cumulus cloud reaches its fingers upward
Towards a larger network of clouds
In hopes of landing a new job in the cloudy marketplace.
Networking is what you make of it.
You can be the woman who says yes or the woman who says no.
I don’t expect to see leopard prints on young women
But when I do I make a run for it.
The survival rate is higher for those who don’t react in ugly situations
But I am not afraid of death or the little bruises I pick up along the way.
I can get down naked on all fours and be the woman who says yes
Even though I am the woman who says no.

I’ve been very taken with what After Hours Editions, a relatively new small literary press [see their periodicities essay here], has been offering, most recently Brooklyn, New York poet and artist Christine Shan Shan Hou’s full-length the joy and terror are both in the swallowing (New York/Kingston NY: After Hour Editions, 2021). Set in seven grouped sections of first-person lyric narratives, her poems are sharp and direct, rife with lessons and humour, and a confidence that occasionally swings toward swagger. I’m charmed by the longer stretches, and the section of short bursts of haiku, such as the poem “BATH,” that offers: “The internet is / a place to live your fiction / in a heart-shaped tub [.]” Hers are lively poems that seek and search and hold great truths; attentive, and writing out through tales, fables, study and story, and the results of her explorations so far. “I stare into a lightbox / to study pure happiness,” she writes, as part of the poem “SUNDAY AFTERNOON.” Later, in the same short piece, offering: “This is a fable about the lengths to which / I will go to become my most enlightened self [.]” Her poems are smart, even cheeky, revealing and revelatory. “After the physical therapist said that the pain is mostly in my head,” she writes, to open the poem “SOME FACTS ABOUT MYSELF,” “my arm has been hurting less. // That is the power men have on my psyche.” Her poems are awash in facts and story, and how each one impacts upon the other, holding sway or shades of truth; composed neither around the hero nor the action of the fable, but as one who attempts to understand the wider landscape. “I wonder if needlepointing is what / Keeps one well-rounded,” she asks, as part of “AWAKENING YOURSELF,” “If an airplane falls from the sky / Who will catch it?”