Willie Lin, conversations among stones

 

Birth

Already, the crops are failing.
The crows shuttling back and forth,
breaking branches, dropping stones.
How easy to read sadness
into the empty room. It is yours.
All season the family has been filling
pots and jars with river water
heavy with red silt. They are tired
of that color. Cover the moon.
It is good to be inconsolable.
It is good to leave the fish uneaten,
to sing a little, sweep the floor.
Traces of breath, abundant as winter,
the uncreated memory of you.

The full-length debut by Chicago-based poet Willie Lin, following the chapbooks Lesser Birds of Paradise (MIEL) and Instructions for Folding (Northwestern University Press), is conversations among stones (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2023), a collection of meditative lyrics composed in clear narratives with direct purpose. “A knife pares to learn what is flesh.” the two-line poem “Dear” offers, “What is flesh.” There’s a remarkable way Lin’s poems unfold, unfurl and slowly reveal, offering an intriguing patience, pause and cadence. “The things in my life / I remember with perfect clarity:,” she writes, but I’d offer that these poems themselves are wonderful examples of that “perfect clarity” she suggests, as Lin composes first-person intimacies of thought and narrative that work to comprehend the world, both internal and external, and how one finds and secures one’s place. There’s a lot of considering within these poems, and a lot to consider. “Now when the wind comes,” she writes, to open the poem “Brief History of Exile,” a six-page expansive lyric set at the heart of the collection, around all else is structured, “I lean into it. / I’m learning to be that pure, relinquish or carry without // seeming to.” This is a book of tethering and of feeling unplaced, untethered, attempting to better comprehend those connections, and the very notion of belonging, instead of automatically attempting to latch on to what might come along next. “I thought if I / could desire less / I could be happy.” she writes, to open the poem “Gauntlet for the Left Hand,” “I was moving toward / an idea.”