Brother Poem

Will Harris’s second collection carries a title that sounds teasingly like a placeholder: Brother Poem. Is it a work-in-progress, an expediently named document for collecting fleeting thoughts? Does it fall into a tradition of brother poems, from Catullus’s ave atque vale (“hail and farewell”) to the splintered elegies of Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of ? Yes, and yes, but the truest, most mysterious way to parse Harris’s title is as an equation, Brother = Poem. Harris’s brother is imaginary: he exists only within these pages, as real or as fictive as a poem.

Like Harris’s earlier RENDANG (2020), Brother Poem swivels between a shapeshifting title sequence and shorter poems in sandpapered-smooth stanzas. Both modes spill over with narratives upon narratives: dreams, etymologies, half-remembered anecdotes, shaggy-dog stories. Harris, a poet of Chinese Indonesian and British heritage, is an especially inquisitive close reader of the stories we tell and are told about who we are—stories his poems revise, or, willingly or not, recreate:

Pages later, hoping to dig up those “roots,” the unidentified “he” finds himself “in Beijing expecting / the thud of recognition.” All he recognizes are familiar Asian exports, as transient as he is: “he licked toffee apples / and drank bubble tea / his feet never touching / real earth.”

Brother Poem, Harris writes, “is an experiment in talking sideways.” Its stellar title sequence, interleaved with family photographs, proves how. Instead of talking back to his roots or forward to projected readers, Harris speaks to his fraternal mirror-image, “I-not-I,” in tones ranging from childish bickering (“give it back to me give it back”) to magic-spell wishfulness: “be with me   be.” However outlandish Harris’s premise sounds—though who’s never known an imaginary friend, someone to stand beside amid growing pains and intergenerational traumas?—the linguistic tether these siblings share is as genuine as poetry permits: “though my life was / broken yes my voice was / heard.”