then telling be the antidote by Xiao Due Shan

This is an excerpt of my review from The Compulsive Reader (August 2024). The full review can be read at

https://compulsivereader.com/2024/08/21/the-shifting-of-the-possibilities-of-the-world-a-review-of-xiao-yue-shans-then-telling-be-the-antidote/

A city is a collection. Of buildings and people and neighborhoods and animals and trash and clouds. There is no place to look at the city from the city and see the entirety of the city. In this way, Shan’s collection of poems observes the world. Each poem is a skewed viewpoint of some entirety. Her city isn’t just a physical city, although those are infused in the poems (Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Montreal, Hanoi). Shan’s “city” is also the family, nature, love, time, dreams, reality. Place (the literal, physical city) is important, and travel among these physical realities is part of the dynamic Shan writes about in these poems—otherness, newness, migration—but these are not poems of leisure and repose, and place is just one of the elements. Of equal importance is humanness, nature, dream, time, light, water.

These elements are juxtaposed and interchanged with surreal effect. This set of equations leads to an equality among the concrete and abstract, among people and objects, dream and reality. Take, for example, how time and space are combined in “to talk with you,” “your noon and my evening congregated / touched.” And how space is collapsed in “always the clock, always the corridor, always the staircase” with the phrase “what does my voice do, but send me to you, in pieces?”