Burying the Mountain

The poems in Burying the Mountain are characterized by a wild ekphrastic stream of consciousness, with Shangyang Fang narrating under the influence of classical music, opera, and Baroque and avant-garde painting, while reinventing myths and fairy tales. In “Phantom Limb,” Fang asks us to consider what if the tin soldier hadn’t fallen in love with the paper ballerina, but “with his missing limb.” The poet treats these allusions with a forensic skepticism, demanding that the reader reconsider the “jar in Tennessee” and what Icarus’s fall really foreshadows (which, to Fang, is the impending loss of their father). While these poems possess a modernist fervor, they also display a dreamy slowness in their explorations of loneliness. In one poem, the moon falls apart “from her memories.” In another, the poet writes: “When you return / I will trade my face / For your mirror.” Loss is projected and substituted on Fang’s reflective surfaces.

Fang’s use of Chinese characters throughout the book is especially compelling. As a Chinese speaker explained to me, the poem “轰隆隆 Is the Sound of Thunder” uses sound characters to render onomatopoeia for rain, laughter, and wind, all while completing the line in English. The title characters translate to “Honglonglong,” which a Chinese speaker would understand as the sound of a rumbling thunder (in English, maybe “Boom”). Such devices bring an intimate sonic address to a Chinese readership while simultaneously defamiliarizing the work for English-only readers. 

Fang’s masterful orchestration of flowers (daises, chrysanthemums, “roadside lilies”), animals (“a lime butterfly”) and food (“an overripe Flemish peach,” “half-cooked eggs,” “a difficult apple”), a triangulation that appears throughout the book, offers a Steinian critique of the stability of nouns, of that which sustains (food) and woos (flowers) and differentiates us as human (animals). In “Fish,” Fang writes: “the fish thrashed like a lamb, I thought it was a lamb. Small one. A sincere sacrifice.” The poem “A Difficult Apple,” closes: “The apple before me / has never attempted to convince me / it is an apple.” Nothing is ever what it seems: A butchered fish becomes a lamb by way of its sacrificial form. An apple is not just an apple, but “a jailed soul,” a “pomme,” and finally, a way to enter into the queer and “dark, ignorant language of fruits.”