A Blind Salmon

A Blind Salmon, by Tusán writer Julia Wong Kcomt, who died earlier this year, unfolds on the scale of the spectacle—dramatic, even shocking images are presented in a flat, matter-of-fact tone. Many of these poems, in translation by Jennifer Shyue, recall myths. The book’s opening poem, “armenian rose,” has a fable-like quality:

little girl, four days old, you go
lifeless in the grimy nails of
a starving man
shu-
cking petals off
a girl
pale tulle
pair of hips wide as your country
your country wrecked
your sky
and sun

Kcomt’s myths are set in the contemporary world, which makes them particularly terrifying in their exploration of subjects like madness, immigration, and motherhood. These poems have an allegorical flourish:

my daughter’s father was mejicano
and i fear that border
more than the sun and its glandular splotches
more than a tsunami

[…]

and i wonder whether my daughter
now understands she’s a borderless bird
who killed her father during a walled-in bolero
wounded me fatally

In her afterword, Shyue writes: “I do not claim that A Blind Salmon is ‘equal’ to Julia’s Un salmón ciego, or vice versa. […] But what I can tell you is that there are […] two books published in two discrete zones in time and space.” Shyue is, in fact, more than equal to the task of bringing the various elements of Kcomt’s work together, while marking these poems with her own imprint. A self-translation by Kcomt included in this book reads: “but the west eye / have more intentions than faces,” which becomes, in Shyue’s rendering: “the gaze of the west / sows its intentions.” Such differences in tone, tense, and diction give the reader a sense of the range of possibilities these poems, and their translations, open up.