Bodega, by Su Hwang, Reviewed by Robyn Earhart
Bodega, by Su Hwang, Reviewed by Robyn Earhart
Bodega
Su Hwang
Milkweed Editions
October, 2019
ISBN 978-1-57131-524-3
96 pages
Reviewed by ROBYN EARHART
(Much gratitude to Milkweed Editions for sending me an early copy of Su’s work to review.)
Su Hwang is a bit of a legend in the Twin Cities literary community. Poetry Asylum cofounder, recipient of the inaugural Jerome Hill Fellowship in Literature, winner of the Academy of America Poets James Wright Prize, and teacher with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. It doesn’t hurt that she comes from literary royalty too. Additionally, Hwang is a Pushcart Prize-nominee for her poem “The Price of Rice” from Vol. 21 of Water~Stone Review and now she can add debut author with her collection Bodega, forthcoming in October from Milkweed Editions.
Hwang’s debut is an exploration of the personal and public, a compressed rendering of the large-scale and not wholly singular im/migrant experience. It explores themes of identity, assimilation, marginalization, ancestral detachment, and race. Amid the backdrop of the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, and sequenced in a mini collection of three sections, it begins with a stanza from “The Widow” by W.S. Merwin:
This is the waking landscape
Dream after dream after dream walking away through
Invisible invisible invisible.
What follows are Hwang’s first series of poems with dichotomous effect: We’re introduced to this idea of luck and hope, or the perception of the ‘American Dream’ in poems like “Instant Scratch Off” and “Fresh Off the Boat | An Iconography”. With time, the facade that hard work and perseverance will pay off is cracked until the slightest agitation for projected assimilation spills out. When the young narrator and her brother witness racial profiling in “1.5 Proof”, Hwang considers how a language barrier can attribute to the policing of bodily agency:
Multiply (y) into the denominator of exponential
decay. Divide extraction to posit true values of coveting
zero = the summation of erasures.
In “Corner Store Still | Life”, Hwang considers how with each passing micro-aggressive encounter, one can begin to lose facets of identity and be gobbled up by the larger system, like animals coming to slaughter:
Can anyone
truly inhabit another – how meat
of the body must be seized then cleaved:
laid bare to be wolfed down whole
as it’s done in the wild.
Once the layers of initial assimilation and identity erasure are peeled back, Hwang introduces us to the next section of her collection with a stanza from “Flores Woman” by Tracy K. Smith. Hwang grapples with the concept of marginalization on a more macro-level assault, watching as the social ecosystem codifies immigrants to the brink of marginalization until a once fully-fleshed person with hopes and dreams becomes a dehumanized version of their past. In “Fault Lines” she implores:
Reconstruct the architecture of youth before
Muscles petrify to granite cartilage
Whittled clean before clavicles divulge
Signs of collapse.
In a series of poems titled “Han” Hwang questions commodification and the pressures from society to categorize or package identity. While assimilation is somewhat natural in a new setting, it can both whitewash an individual and negate the collective identity of a community, and Hwang pushes back on the notion that assimilation can simply mean “forgotten”:
Do not mistake hyphen for lack
of discipline or vestigial claim as surrender.
To cap off the three-part sections, Hwang includes a stanza from poem #12 within “The River Within the River” by Gregory Orr, a poet who found solace in poetry after experiencing loss and deep grief. One thematic thread woven throughout is the specificity of language and speaker comprehension. In her narrative poems, Hwang often reflects back on childhood experiences of racism her family endured, and her own embarrassment at hearing her parents’ stilted attempts at speaking the English language.
Hwang is so at ease creating ripe settings with vivid details—coins as cowrie shells, baseball announcers on the radio, the sweat of laboring in the sweltering New York heat—that each housing project, each city street, each bodega breathes its own energy until they’re indistinguishable from the other, a conglomeration of commodities, crushed hopes, a grim reality. This collection is startlingly frank and imagistic, tonally compressed, and an absolute must-read.
Author:
Robyn Earhart
Assistant Managing Editor
Robyn Earhart is a second year MFA candidate in creative nonfiction. She is currently the assistant managing editor at WSR and an associate editor with Runestone Review, Hamline’s national online undergrad journal. Robyn enjoys learning through close study and observations of human behavior, and elements in the natural world.
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Su Hwang
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Su Hwang
1. Tell us about your poem in Volume 21, “The Price of Rice.” How did it come to be?
B
ack when I was putting my manuscript together, I wanted to write a poem honoring my mother’s sacrifices and hardships to balance out (tonally) the other poems highlighting our somewhat complex relationship (like so many mother-daughters)––while acknowledging my own complicity in the dynamic. She rarely talks about her difficult childhood (losing her father during the Korean War, displacement, homelessness, etc.), but one of the snippets I’ve never forgotten is how just handfuls of rice fed my great-grandmother, grandmother, two aunts, and an uncle for a substantial period of time during and after the war.
Our generation takes so much for granted; I take so much for granted. This poem brings to light the enormous chasm between my mother’s upbringing in war-torn Korea and my life here in America––where abundance is the norm, not the exception. As a child of immigrants, I’m always negotiating that emotional space between gratitude and guilt. The poem came to me when I put my iPhone in some rice after dropping it in water and I remembered my mother once using the word “catastrophe.” One of the major themes in the book is about the difficulties of communication. “The Price of Rice” is one of those rare “gift poems”––once the first line came to me, I basically wrote the entire poem in one sitting.
2. What excites you as a writer? What turns you off, makes you turn away or stop reading a piece of writing?
It’s still hard for me to believe I’m here answering these questions for such an amazing literary journal. Six years ago when I was in my late thirties, I packed up my jalopy and drove to the Midwest from SF/Oakland after years of waitressing and moving around aimlessly. Somehow I landed a spot at the University of Minnesota’s MFA Program from what I like to call a Hail Mary application process. So I guess the fact that I can call myself a writer in my early forties after decades of self-doubt/fear of failure/imposter syndrome/whatever you want to call it is exciting, plus I love that new communities can be built through my creative practice. I think point-of-view is really important and if a piece of writing lacks a strong voice, I tend to get bored fairly easily.
3. What was an early experience that led to you becoming a writer?
I can’t really pinpoint one experience––it’s been a circuitous and oftentimes random journey. I knew about my paternal family’s literary legacy in Korea, but it wasn’t something I thought about as a child (of immigrants)––art is normally seen as a distraction or luxury. I’m pretty sure my parents would’ve preferred I become a doctor or the wife of one at the very least. Friends of my parents and other random adults would say writing had to be in my blood because of my grandfather, Hwang Sun-won, and my uncle Hwang Tong-gyu, who is a renowned Korean poet and scholar. My father was a sports journalist before we immigrated to the U.S., so maybe writing is in my blood. I didn’t find poetry (or did poetry fine me?) until I was 36 years old.
4. What are some themes/topics that are important to your writing?
BODEGA explores issues of identity, race, im/migration, and marginalization within marginalized communities. Most of the themes are political in nature because my existence and body have been politicized. Social justice issues are paramount in my writing, and my involvement with the MN Prison Writing Workshop and Poetry Asylum brings abolition to the forefront. My next poetry collection will examine madness, mass incarceration, and other metaphors of containment. I’m also dabbling in witchery––from learning about astrology and crystals to reading tarot.
5. What does your creative process look like? How does the environment you are in shape your work or where do you like to write?
My creative process is a hot mess if I’m being perfectly frank. There’s really no rhyme or reason to the “process.” I count daydreaming as part of my writing process, so I guess it means I write all the time? I really wish I could be more disciplined, but alas, I’m not that kind of writer. Sometimes I write in bed but most of the time I’m at my dining table (which doubles as a desk) in pajama pants. Is there such a thing as osmotic writing? Hmm.
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Su Hwang was raised in New York then called the Bay Area home before transplanting to the Midwest. A recipient of the inaugural Jerome Hill Fellowship in Literature, the Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize, writer-in-residence fellowships at Dickinson House and Hedgebrook, among others––her debut poetry collection BODEGA is forthcoming with Milkweed Editions in October 2019. She teaches creative writing with the MN Prison Writing Workshop and is the co-founder of Poetry Asylum. Su currently lives in Minneapolis.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Michael Pearce
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Michael Pearce
1. Tell us about your poem in Volume 21, “Closing Time.” How did it come to be?
My mother was Jewish, my father was a WASP, and neither was religious. I find ethnicity confusing, and my ethnicity in particular. Since most of our social life came about through my mother, I grew up in a largely Jewish—though secular—community.
In my early twenties, I got a job in a shop that manufactured furniture. Soon after I started there, an older German craftsman asked me what sort of name Pearce was. I told him it was English. Next thing I knew, I was hearing angry rants about Jews. I was afraid to confront him, and to my everlasting shame, I never told him about my Jewish background. But some good came of it; I have tried ever since to make sense of my heritage, to appreciate its richness, to be open and forthright about who I am. This comes up in poems (and occasionally a story or play), often with some confusion and ambivalence—I’m still not religious, I have problems with Israel’s policies, yadda yadda. I’ve been in several Jewish museums over the years, but the one in “Closing Time” exists only in my psyche.
Incidentally, I learned something about my German woodworking colleague that has informed my understanding of the complexity of human nature: He was married to an African-American woman and took pride in that fact.
2. To you practice any other art forms? If so, do these influence your writing and/or creative process?
I play music. I’m not a pro, but I’ve played lots of gigs at lots of venues over the past decade. Occasionally I’ve written stories and poems about the world of music. For example, I played briefly in a band called True Danger (yes, I should have known). After a gig in an insanely loud punk club in San Francisco, I became mostly deaf for two months. Any kind of conversation was difficult. Music was an ugly cacophony and I was certain I’d never hear or play it again. That debacle inspired a long story about a musician who goes deaf under similar circumstances. Eventually my hearing improved and I came back to music (though I steered clear of True Danger).
I think music informs my writing on a more subtle and pervasive level. Especially when I’m writing poetry, I find myself making decisions about where things are going from a rhythmic and melodic perspective—repetition with variation; enough repetition, time to introduce a new theme; speed up the action, slow it down; time to add visual detail, if only for a shift in texture; time to enjoy simple, old-fashioned assonance, alliteration, meter, rhyme—or time to avoid such hackneyed devices at all costs. I’m sure all poets are guided by a musical sensibility, some very consciously. But I suspect that the experience of playing melodies and, in particular, constructing solos puts more emphasis on sound-emotion connections and feeling your way forward through the musical landscape of a poem. Interestingly, jazz musicians often describe the process of crafting a solo as the telling of a story.
3. What projects or pieces are you working on right now?
A few years ago, while working on a poem that was going nowhere, I decided to just let my fingers wander on the keyboard—an ancient (and slightly depressing) creative writing exercise that I’d never tried before, nor have I since. At some point my aimless scribbling took a sharp turn and I found myself in a fictional town in a small mountain valley in California, a place that felt familiar but had different rules from the world I walk around in. I said ‘found myself’, but the me in the poem had a different voice and way of looking at things. I later named the town Santa Lucia, but haven’t given the narrator a name.
Something about the narrator and the not-quite-real landscape he moved through kept drawing me back. With each new poem I’d develop new characters and discover new and peculiar aspects of Santa Lucia. I felt like a child as I explored my imaginary town, and the persona of the narrator carries some of the naïve acceptance that I felt (and still feel) in that slightly magical world. I like that world, and I like my narrator; he navigates his life in a less guarded, more forthright manner than I do. He struggles. He tries to make the best of things.
I thought I was finished with the Santa Lucia poems a couple years ago. Then late last year another one came along, and then another. I’m in the middle of one right now.
Michael Pearce’s poetry and fiction have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Spillway, EPOCH, The Yale Review, New Ohio Review, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. His fiction and poetry have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, among other national prizes. He lives in Oakland, California, and plays saxophone in the Bay Area band Highwater Blues.
A Peek Into Production, by Meghan Maloney-Vinz
A Peek Into Production, by Meghan Maloney-Vinz
A pile of word docs soon to become a journal.
With the last month of summer upon us, it seems like the right time to check into the production of Volume 22.
Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
In May, after the editorial board and their faculty editors made their final selections, production began in earnest with an initial Design + Concept Meeting at MCAD’s DesignWorks. At the meeting, this year’s MCAD student design intern, Patrick Sexton (who had read a first draft of this year’s issue by then) presented the production team (executive editor, Mary Rockcastle, assistant managing editor, Robyn Earhart, DesignWorks studio manager, Dylan Cole, graphic designer Kayla Campbell, and myself) and with photography that he felt best corresponds with the recurring images and themes of the written work selected.
It is an exciting meeting as the marriage of image and language begins to take shape and we start to see the issue in its physical form. We envision the reading, the poster at the podium, and the bookshelf at AWP. The journal has a tangible future that fuels our collective momentum.
Before being handed off to MCAD for layout, the entire manuscript goes through several thorough editing rounds. First, and early round of direct editing between genre editors and contributors, and then again with our copy editor and proofreader, Anne Kelley Conklin.
After all of Anne’s requested changes are satisfied, the entire manuscript is finally handed over to Patrick and the DesignWorks team who work for two weeks on the layout for the first galley.
The galley, or proof is our first version of what will eventually become that beauty on the shelf. It is actually presented to us in paper form, so we can actually experience what the spreads look like, and how the layout of each specific piece works on the page template. Using our style guide, we compare the pieces to each other, but we also check each piece to the final version submitted. Sometimes small spacing issues or other quirks emerge or get lost in the translation of files, and it’s our job to find these inconsistencies and set them right.
We are currently at the review stage of Galley 1.
We will repeat the drill again in about three weeks, when we will receive the second galley. Hopefully, all of the requested changes have been made and if not, we repeat again until it is right. It is at this stage that we also make available to our contributors a PDF version of their piece as it is set to appear in the journal. It is our last line of approval before going to print in mid-late September.
And then we hold our breath. The work is done and the time to surface is near. The crisp white boxes appear at our door in early October, and with rapid heart rates and steady hands we slice open the tops.
The neat stacks of that magic, materialized.
Author:
MEGHAN MALONEY-VINZ
MANAGING EDITOR
MEGHAN MALONEY-VINZ has worked as managing editor for Water~Stone Review for over a decade now. Prior to coming on board with Water~Stone she worked as the design coordinator for Hamline Creative Writing graduate student literary magazine rock, paper, scissors (a journal she helped create). Aside from her work with Hamline Creative Writing, Maloney-Vinz is also a founding member and project manager for broadcraft press. and serves as managing editor for The UnderReview, a sports adjacent literary journal. Her spare time finds her at a local sporting event (big or small), driving her children to various activities, or day-drinking with other writerly types.
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Melissa Hite
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Melissa Hite
1. Tell us about your poem, “Landmannalaugar,” in Volume 21. How did it come to be?
When I was in college, I spent a week in Iceland as part of a study abroad program through my conservative Christian university. Our guides took us to this beautiful, remote hot spring up in the mountains—Landmannalaugar—and when we got there, the spring was filled with naked people, most of them elderly. We, of course, were not going to be naked in the hot spring. We were required to bring one-piece (not two-piece) swimsuits. But something about these peoples’ nudity struck me as so beautiful and pure, Edenic. I was jealous of their freedom to just exist in their bodies without shame.
2. What excites you as a writer? What turns you off, makes you turn away or stop reading a piece of writing?
In my (very limited) experience, life is so much weirder than I ever expect it to be. Emotions and situations are so much more complicated than most media has prepared me for. So when something captures an experience or a feeling that I’ve had, in all its bizarre complexity, I love that. It’s validating for me. And it takes so much skill to do well. In the same vein, if something rings false, it’s going to lose me (I can usually tell when a female character has been written by a man—I think most women can).
3. What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work? Do–or have–you had any mentors in your writing life?
As a young writer, I’m very much still working on finding my own voice… so I find that my work often mimics whoever I’ve been reading most recently. I love Flannery O’Connor, John Steinbeck, Ann Patchett, Mary Oliver. I’m forever indebted to my high school creative writing teacher, Mr. Jacobson, who showed me that poetry didn’t have to be lame, and Dr. Engel, who taught my Writing Fiction class.
4. Do you practice any other art forms? If so, do these influence your writing and/or creative process?
I’ve fallen in love with cooking over the last few months. For the longest time, I told myself I wasn’t a good cook—mainly because I’d never really tried. Discovering that I can cook has been a huge confidence builder. There’s something really fulfilling about making something beautiful that’s also literally sustaining, to me or to people I’m sharing with. I think any kind of creative endeavor like that helps keep your artistic juices flowing even if you’re having a fallow period with your primary art. I’m not always writing, but I’m always doing something to keep that muscle working.
5. What does your creative process look like? How does the environment you are in shape your work or where do you like to write?
Most times, it starts with an uncomfortably long period where I’m just staring at a blank screen, and I’m drained of every creative thought I’ve ever had, and I forget how to write sentences. But I’m told that’s fairly normal. If I can find even one sentence, that can usually open the floodgates. I’ve had to learn to just write a first draft without asking myself if it’s good or not, because if I wonder about that too much, I won’t write anything.
I find I need to move around a lot when I write, especially if I’m hitting a wall. I’ll bounce around from my dining room table to the coffee shop to the library and back. I just need a change of scenery every so often.
Melissa Hite is a writer living in Little Rock, AR. Her work has appeared in Equinox: Poetry and Prose, Relief: A Journal of Faith and Art, and SchoolCEO, among others. You can follow her work at her website https://www.melissakhite.com/.