Eleven Miles to June

In Eleven Miles to June, Ha Kiet Chau negotiates the volatile rumblings of coming-of-age as a Chinese-Vietnamese-American. “I am human—dying to evolve—,” says the speaker in a poem titled “Fitting Inside a Sphere.” This theme is explored throughout the collection, which reads like a bildungsroman in which animals consistently appear as figures that replace or displace the human in states of extreme emotional distress. “I outrun wolves but can’t escape / the lost child,” says the speaker in the book’s title poem. In “Broken Aftermath,” we read:

I was a jackrabbit in a meadow, petrified.
Father was an eagle in the sky, infuriated.

Chau’s strength in these moments is her understanding that not all “evolution” is teleological, progressive, or rational. Instead of a preoccupation with epiphanies and maturity, the poet focuses on nourishment, growth, and seeing oneself as co-evolving with the world around them. As the speaker in “Experimentation” asserts, “I blossomed on solar energy.” Chau’s narrative poems are particularly striking when the voice of the speaker takes on an eerie omniscience, such as in “Virginia Slim and Hawk Eyes,” whose opening lines foreshadow the slow undoing of a family. The poem begins: “A snowman is melting on the lawn, / headless and rail thin, dripping down / 5th avenue like a rivulet.”

At times the collection suffers from its use of the pathetic fallacy, as in the poem “Before 30,” where “Raindrops weep,” or the image of “Fuel groaning for oil” in a poem that invokes Amelia Earhart’s fatal crash, and whose final stanza includes a series of overwrought verbs: “stomping,” “cracking,” “crash,” “flop,” “flinging,” “sobbing,” “rumblings.” But the poet’s commanding mode works to cinch the collection. In “Glass Reflections” the speaker declares, without frill or melodrama, “I should love her, but I don’t // Internal dialogue is cruel,” leaving the reader at the mercy of such mesmerizing certainty and self-possession.