When you leap over the deer carcassesthat line every garden, you will marvelat their tidiness, at how bloodless a deathby drought can be. When I crawl throughthe highway pieces shattered by heat,I will admire the clean slits as I kickaside crumbles of broken stone with littleblistering. When you thread betweenthe overtaken shores and bodies of elders,frozen, when I follow the fallen saplings’directions toward the horizon wherecolorless sky and earth meet, we willremember rippling at the birthday partiesfor corporations and framing the ashof beloved photos burnt in wildfire. Whenwe think of crossing the river to eachother, you from the gorge of the landslideto me at the crest of the typhoon, it is thenwe will find ourselves in a dead imaginary,in some fictive past where the you exists,where I is not a myth we use to keepsurviving at the cost of bird and glacier,home and tenderness. Having ruinedthe future of becoming fossils, finallywe will know that it is for nothing wedie, never in place of drowned seaturtles or swarming locusts, or to foilcancerous sand and mold, not even forthe dance of subway floods or the gracelesseclipse of all our promises and planets.
The End of Crisis
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- June 18, 2023
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© Cindy Juyoung Ok, from House Work (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023).
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Cindy Juyoung Ok has poems in The Massachusetts Review, Narrative, and The Nation, and in a chapbook, House Work (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023), as well as translations of Kim Hyesoon’s poems in Asymptote, The Margins, and Hayden Ferry’s Review. She currently teaches creative writing at Wellesley College.
"Cindy Juyoung Ok’s House Work is a revelation of the interior, and this collection sounds the measure of rooms and language, love and knowing, longing and safety. 'Form' she writes, 'outlives / you, but barely,' revealing that the boundaries of the poem are only slightly less precarious than that of the body, a home only slightly more stable than the field that surrounds it."
—Donika Kelly
"'A woman is a thing that absorbs,' the speaker declares in House Work by Cindy Juyoung Ok. 'I’m sorry we need to be bodies here.' Form, play, and an attention to—as well as an attending to—a world besieged by racialized ('marred by yellow / wages') and gendered ('to be an object of some / verb') labors combine in these profoundly intelligent poems. 'When it comes to survival there is no right / way but there’s no wrong way either.' Knowing that 'form outlives / you,' and that 'exile is always story,' Ok gives shape through cutting syntax, thrumming phonic echoes, and elegantly embroidered lines to new stories about estrangement, desire, and how the human imagination both rescues and restricts. These are poems I wish I’d written, and these are poems that’ll shift how you think. In fact, that’s the final command of this marvelous work: 'Think.'"
—Paul Tran
"I think what Cindy Juyoung Ok’s poems do is they misspeak ('don’t skid yourself') so as to speakbig, where speakbig is like writ large: the little glitch opens on to major malfunction. For example, 'my country / provides an illusion of synthesis, as my landlord supplies // a fantasy of individuality.' Or, 'Lack is spacious and, / a spring, seams me to it.' I think also that these poems are about the safety of a house, or rather 'the idea' of it. Something’s always snagging on the tooth of it. So the poems are also (don’t kid yourself) about threat which lurks through their dexterous, devious syntax: 'a swarm / from which I am wrung. As I, wrong, form.'"
—Aditi Machado
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