Imagine Us, The Swarm

Imagine Us, The Swarm reads like a modular work, greater than the sum of its parts, which restlessly pivots around the question at its core: “what it means / to be at once [a colony] and [alone].” Split across seven hybrid essayistic poems, each intricately varied in form and preoccupation, Muriel Leung’s debut collection approaches what could be conceived of as a poetics—or even an autotheory—of the hive, and all the metaphoric potentials of its sociality. For example, the first chapter deploys a swarming phalanx of periods across white space; they represent worker bees, yes, but the invasion of punctuation also illustrates the stuttered silences and gaps commonly experienced by the diasporic body. In other chapters a cancer cell in the body of the poet’s father transforms into a rich meditation on anti-Asian hate and racism, moving deftly from the Chinese Exclusion Act toward the COVID-19 pandemic.

Leung’s poems expose us to the tough connective tissue, scarred by shame and grief, in narratives of a racialized self that is divided unevenly between the personal, the familial, and the community. At the same time, these poems consider how any one writer can extend their creative life beyond the necropolitics of the colony and its programmed social cell deaths. Leung optimistically advocates for a flight toward that “extension of an improbable future,” toward an imagination without borders, with no use for racial suffering nor misrepresentation. “We can write our origins / sacred here and renounce the country of our fear. / There is only our singular pulse when we fill the sky,” proclaims the narrator, expressing their longing for a world of anti-capitalist justice, radical joy, and freedom dreaming. Through its innovative and galvanizing hybridity, Imagine Us, The Swarm turns us toward a tender reckoning with the precariousness of history and its humming laborers.