Winter Phoenix: Testimonies in Verse

“Who is guilty?” Sophia Terazawa’s powerful debut, Winter Phoenix, grapples with this impossible question in deceptively lush verse. Taking US soldiers’ testimonies from three internationally publicized trials: The Incident on Hill 192, The Winter Soldier Investigation, and The Russell Tribunal, the project evokes the spirit of NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! Threading a devastating line through poetry, justice, archive, and memory, these poems invite readers to “remember what was done to us now moves through you / whether you weep or not.”

Wildly inventive in its experiments with abecedarian form and Morse code, the collection explores the complicated legacy of English, asking us what it means for court proceedings to unfold in the language of the abuser. There is no true protection or integrity to “this ritual of justice without justice; what may lend our body / as its torch, the possibility of saying, No, in four or five separate / languages.” In “Expatiated Fugue,” slashes and extra spacing mimic halting speech: 

[…] Learn to / spēk / just how this / ˈkəntrē / speaks.
You shouldn’t have to / kəm / up with your words, an orchard or its noun flickering […]

Terezawa’s striking imagery draws attention to the fact that atrocity often unfolds amid beauty and asks us to consider what it means to find stunning images in times of trauma. We witness “the peach light at a bend—” and “blue rusting up // its algae, ochre / marrow / bloomed.” Evocative scenes, which recall Daniel Lang’s famous, harrowing 1969 New Yorker article, “Casualties of War: An Atrocity in Vietnam,” shine through in these poems:

golden alabaster trauma
broken into pale

soft-spoken rivers—
. . . 
we stood there
but said nothing

“Why did you stand there and say nothing?” is a recurring refrain in this collection, reshuffled with new line breaks as it grows ever more urgent: “Why did you just / stand there and say nothing?” Not surprisingly, we are gifted no easy answers.