Jennifer Hasegawa, Naomie Anomie: A Biography of Infinite Desire

 

But everywhere,
the child came through
the kiawe trees. 

Ashes to lashes,
dust to lust.
They sang it to scare
the big-time, red-eyed
shadow-stealer away. 

Bottlebrush
and mosquito punk,
they scrubbed through
epochs of moss. 

Glow of molten rock
seeped between branches
to illuminate
a true name. 

Such monomythical sounds
made sluggish blood
flow free again. (“Tombstone Read Mama Cuz They Forgot Her Given Name”)

It is very good to see a second collection by San Francisco-based (by way of Hilo, Hawai’i) poet and community activist Jennifer Hasegawa, her Naomie Anomie: A Biography of Infinite Desire (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2025), following her full-length debut, La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living (Omnidawn, 2020) [see my review of such here]. The back cover of Naomie Anomie writes of how this book is “an experimental poetic take on biography, growing increasingly surreal as it follows the truths behind its unreliable narrator through paradoxes rendered in luxurious detail. This book is a portrait of a flawed life, a symptom of looming omnicrisis, and a lyrical experiment in truth-telling.” The opening poem, “Her First Word Was No,” for example, offers: “Feline teeth / in her brown rolls / of baby flesh / gave her night vision. // Each morning, she watched father / open a tin of tuna / using a tiny opener, / like a folding quarter. // Returned it / to the same spot / on a shelf / on each day / of an entire life.” The poems of Naomie Anomie are set as a quartet of poem-sections that offer first-person biographical moments across a wider tapestry, titles that often anchor poems into narratives that the resulting poem swirls around and away from, held only in place, at times, through that element of title. As the poem “After the Old Hilo Wastewater Treatment Plant” offers: “And she / floated around the backseat / in a soap bubble / as adrenaline / taught her new things. // Where is it easiest / to hide the truth?”

Moving through the poems of Naomie Anomie, I find the narrator less unreliable than considering this a suite of poems offering something beyond simply citing facts or replicating scenes from memory—one does not need to speak of things that happened, precisely, to offer the truth—and her use of the surreal can be used to depict a scene with far greater accuracy. “Nuclear reactions / held hands / to broadcast stories / of great bears / and damned maidens / chained to sea rocks. // By sunrise,” writes the poem “Stoners in the Hands of an Angry God,” “her pupils small / and horns fallen away, / a stream of tiny paper tabs / flew out of her mouth.” It is as though Hasegawa utilizes the facts of recollection as a means to an end, and not as the end-point; using facts as she is able as building blocks towards something other, whether for the truth of the matter, or through working the mechanisms of best serving the sound and the play and the language of her lyric. I don’t consider the narrator unreliable, I suppose (although many of these narrative depictions do read as relatively straightforward, compared to certain other contemporary poets working the surreal), as I’m not working my way through these poems to assemble a biography for the narrator and/or author. “Neighbors set fire / to their garbage/ in a big iron drum / right outside / her bedroom window.,” the poem “Hatshepsut’s Conception Was Through a Divine Wind” writes, “What skills / might she learn / by inhaling / the discards / of others?” As part of a “Process Note” on the collection for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, Hasegawa spoke of how she worked to articulate memory without romanticizing or allowing sentimentality to overrun her lyrics. “It is not that I don’t want people to feel anything when reading my work. I don’t want to force-feed feelings.” Her short essay continues:

For me, it’s the subtle feelings that ripple out from reading a poem. I love a poem that’s just on the verge of losing logical comprehension, and the way it can still evoke a subtle feeling in the reader. And that subtle feeling, whatever it is, is the poem’s true purpose for that reader.

Her approach to these poems provide for movement and sound over an adherence to biographical facts, allowing the flow of her lyrics their own agency, while utilizing the tools of her experience over adherence to straightforward narratives, and she achieves this to powerful effect. She’s been consistent about her approach, also, and the new essay follows along with how she described her process two years prior, as part of her statement in the “Spotlight series,” writing: “My approach to poetry is based on randomness, memory, and emotion. In my case, these things operate and move like a chain.” A chain, as she writes, continuing a trajectory and legacy not far off from what American poet Charles Olson wrote some seventy-five years ago through his “Projective Verse”: “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION.”