Jennifer Soong, Comeback Death

 

better my pain, my body
in swindle me than whatever is numb and fancy
who is responsible for these hacky people? 

I heaped my body over frozen routes
domed rosette traps crackling under me 

I was made, like the mother deer, to survive by the first
chamber of my goods

I will not deplete the world for myself
I will not deplete myself for the world 

and by what name do you know your suffrage?

I’m a bit behind, it would seem, just now seeing Denver, Colorado poet and literary critic Jennifer Soong’s recent title, Comeback Death (Krupskaya, 2024), and she’s already a new collection out since then I should probably attempt to garner, My Earliest Person (The Last Books, 2025). Otherwise, Soong is the author of titles such as Near, At (New York NY: Futurepoem, 2019) [see my review of such here] and Suede Mantis / Soft Rage (Black Sun Lit, 2022) (another book I seem not to have caught), as well as the dos-a-dos chapbook title When I Ask My Friend, by Jennifer Soong/Points of Amperture, by Daniel Owen (Brooklyn NY: DoubleCross Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Comeback Death is a book-length lyric suite constructed via a triptych of extended sections of lyric fragments and self-contained moments—“I. Contempt” (“for Sappho”), “II. Entr’acts: Or, the Gist of Uneven Bars, Sirens, and the Gossip of Fish and Feather” (“for Leslie Scalapino and Lyn Hejinian”) and “III. Smoke” (“for Ingeborg Bachmann”)—all of which collaborate in a book of voices and responses, clarifications and . Working her texts as a blend of response and homage to the works of particular poets, each section’s lyrics and lyric fragments wrap around and move through and across as a kind of conversation between Soong and her particular subject/target. “to this day I do not understand / though it seems I could / this unhappiness which without / I could not solve,” she writes, as part of the opening section, “yet with it am lost to / cleverer colors, sorrier troubles / always unrelating me to other men— [.]” The poetry-collection-as-conversation as a form, working so overtly, is certainly not a new one, and Soong’s approach is very different than, say, Montreal poet and translator Erín Moure’s Theophylline: an a-poretic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo) (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 2023) [see my review of suchhere], and possibly might be closer to the approach of Philadelphia poet Laynie Browne’s array of book-length poet response collections [see my review of her latest here]. Soong responds, but she works through each particular author as a way through which to respond, as a means, perhaps, as opposed to an end. It is through her subjects, her dedications, that such responses might even be possible. As Soong’s third section, dedicated to Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) begins:

Why does this nothingness take me
            for one who cares for waking hours
drunklessness spent in shirts never touched by
                                                            the one I want.
I go to work and the nothingness
fills the insides of my fingers, my eyeballs
of nothingness, my heart.

To best understand another person, it is said, one needs to walk a mile (or kilometre, I suppose) in their shoes. For one writer to best understand another, subsequently, is to work this kind of literary response, one that can get far deeper into the bones and earth of a writer’s approach and thinking than writing a review or an essay. Or, as the second section, for Leslie Scalapino (1944-2010) and LynHejinian (1941-2024), two important (and even legendary) Bay Area poets, editors and mentors, begins:

was it always
that? my face
collapses in the sea
tender
splits
with which to slash
open requests. hmm.
the birds are becoming
watering vessels.
strangle me soon or I am
reluctant to have you over.
in the outer-space of your eyes
I’ve been thinking

“In Comeback Death,” Thom Donovan writes to open his note at the back of the collection, “Jennifer Soong dramatizes one of the key problems of our time, and indeed any time, which is how to reorganize the (negative) affects structuring intersubjectivity and thus conditioning our capacity to act in a common interest among others. This starts with direct address, with a you marked by a grammar of suffering different than I.” In her own note that precedes this, Soong writes of a shift of her work from sounding “mostly American and sometimes British” into a blend, after she relocated from New Jersey to Oxford, into elements of German, Russian and French. “Being Chinese,” she writes, “I didn’t have to worry as much about whether or not my poems, my feelings, or my tears would turn out Asian. They simply did. And being a Chinese-American in England meant that I could make my new pastoral surroundings, with its cows and swans, as Chinese as ever, since so many of the early Chinese poets had been landscape poets away from home. In any case, the opening section of what you’ve read was really an English thing, which means that I dedicated it, as I did, to Sappho.” As she writes to end her own two-page note:

None of this really matters too much when it comes to the reading of these poems, which are busy with dread, gender, sarcasm, sublimation of pain, fruit, ambition, and fecundity. It’s only because syntax is always related to feeling, and because feeling is always (in part) physical and therefore related to place, and because place is always (in part) imagined and felt, and because all of this allows us to be in multiple places at the same time that I have thought it may be of some interest to put this down.