Ward Toward

“When it comes to survival there is no right // way but there’s no wrong way either,” writes Cindy Juyoung Ok in her debut poetry collection, Ward Toward. With a candor bolstered by curiosity and experimentation, the author weaves experiences of isolation and dislocation (both physical and psychological) into her poems, while maintaining an awareness of the inadequacy of language to capture or describe reality. “P.S. Please Forgive Poor Grammar” begins:

Maybe you are not
wake up yet. Today is another
new day God allows us. I can’t
say I understand
your feeling totally.
But I remembered
being your age.

In her “Notes” to the book, Ok explains that this poem came from emails her mother sent to her “between 2011 and 2013,” and which were “ruptured and remade with her [mother’s] blessing.” Rupturing and remaking are at the heart of many of the poems in Ward Toward, as the author plays with a variety of forms to express what Rae Armantrout, in her foreword to this book, calls the “feeling of being in-between.”

Ok, who is Korean American, is keenly aware of what it means to live on the hyphen, being categorized and seen as other. Her language comes from the crevices, from the places where the breakage happens: “You call me ho; it’s short for home” says the speaker in “Terms and Conditions,” a poem that explores surprising word combinations with sound and meaning, emphasizing how significant this is for bilingual and bicultural speakers.

                                            To be
a child is to gather secrets, an elder
to risk in transit. Once when I was
recovering, covering again myself,
I confused sharing for stealing, read
murder into shadows until laughter
came from silhouettes.

The languages spoken by the author and the cultures she belongs to are not in opposition to but rather complement—or become extensions of—each other. Words are reinterpreted in a variety of ways. Ok’s poems challenge the reader to see beyond what is, “You name me ma; I know it means mine.”