Muscle Memory

In “Scansion Between the Ropes,” the opening poem of Jenny Liou’s debut collection Muscle Memory, poetry itself gets knocked back against the ropes as a speaker gives and receives punches in a Los Angeles boxing gym, where she discovers her opponent “majored in English, fell in love with poetry, / then hung it up, instead of hanging up the gloves.” We learn the “myth of poetry” is what it “has lost and is forever trying to recover … feet on a road, / breath nudging lungs, hands on a foe or beloved.” In writing poems, the speaker declares, we have “wrung the life out of” poetry, but in the ring the “JAB-CROSS is the boxer’s iamb, the JAB-JAB-CROSS his anapest.”

Opening with the inadequacy of written verse is a bold move for a poet; if poems are mere stale remnants of uncapturable real poetry in motion, why read on? What drew me in was the speaker’s positioning of herself as a perpetual outsider, as someone who has “tried to have it both ways for a while, / tried feeding my body and my mind,” caught between her boyfriend, a historian who is afraid to sit too close to the ring, and her boxing mates who push a box of books roughly to the floor. Visiting her extended family in China, the speaker is denied access to her deceased grandfather’s “military flight log” by an uncle who insists she “couldn’t understand,” then doubles down when the speaker suggests her father could translate: “they said he could not, my need creating their need to deny me.” In a poem about a family cruise in China we learn of a “White hippie man” making “vague eyes” at the speaker when she is only seventeen, heightening her sense of ill-belonging in a “country that is not my own.” But it’s this outsider’s perspective that allows the speaker, in the opening poem, to anticipate her opponent’s move and know to strike first: “he’s going to show me with his fists how little I belong. I hit him hard, and he steps back.”