An Encounter With A TransPacific Poetics Destabilizes Identity Categories

A must-read anthology (not a phrase you read every day, unless you tune into Harriet on the reg), A TransPacific Poetics (Litmus Press, 2017), edited by Lisa Samuels and Sawako Nakayas, is reviewed at Hyphen Magazine. "Much of the collection features writing that exists in relation to textual and non-textual artifacts, and to geographies and histories that have profoundly shaped the experience of transpacific life: colonialism, military conquest, legacies of white settlements and racism," writes Mia Ayumi Malhotra. More:

No two pieces in A TransPacific Poetics are alike, though all share a common concern for language that moves across this shared space. Many of the poems enact language processes through typological drift, whitespace and strikethrough, as in Craig Santos Perez’s "from unincorporated territory [guma’]," which performs text as currents and tidal waves. His poems include a “militarized ars poetica” and several refracted glossaries of military terms, which make their own argument for what constitutes a transpacific poetics. Ya-Wen Ho’s recursive poem sequence “from All the Identity Answers” cannibalizes itself and the space on which it’s printed, listing identities that range from “a person perceived as Asian; an Asian; a faux-Asian” to “a person who celebrates birthdays awkwardly; a person who often (and embarrassingly) mishears.” In similar fashion, Lehua M. Taitano’s “from A Bell Made of Stones” dramatizes the illegibility of transpacific experience through textual layering. Her lines weave elements of cultural history, family loss and information from the Guam Visitors Bureau into eerie palimpsests that, in places, are only faintly readable. In many ways, this radical collection of writing — memory cards, palimpsests, lists, ship’s logs — defies categorization and even, in some cases, legibility. Taken together, the works function as signs pointing to textual worlds beyond themselves.

For the U.S. reader, this encounter with poetry and other writing from Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia destabilizes identity categories that, in the United States, are all too commonly drawn by national or ethnic origin. Reading essays so firmly grounded in other hemispheres,  [...] we realize how seldom we hear voices from across the water and how isolated we are in our American context. 

Read on at Hyphen.