Review by Abbie Kiefer
Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms is, in part, an accounting of absences: the father who chose to leave, the sister and nephew who both died by suicide, the loss of religious faith, the book’s eponymous ancient Korean states. Even the speaker’s birth is described in terms of depletion: she is emptied into the world.
Joan Kwon Glass anchors her collection with twelve poems titled for hungry ghosts, based on ghosts of Korean Buddhism who suffer because they cannot be sated. The spirits Glass imagines hunt or eat wind or live on hope but, like their Buddhist counterparts, remain unsatisfied. Because these ghosts lack form but not presence, they are a kind of paradoxical absence. As is hunger—a lack that makes itself deeply felt. The speaker calls it a “familiar hum.”
In cataloging and contending with what’s missing, these poems highlight a contradiction: that an absence can be so vast, it creates its own existence. Glass uses that tension to striking effect. In “Inheritance,” the speaker recounts the story of her grandparents fleeing Daegu at the start of the Korean war. The speaker’s mother, then five, fails to board the train in time and the speaker tells us:
i grew up hearing this story again and again / propelled on the brink of war / her country soon to be punctuated by cardinal directions / her body suspended / pulled up onto a train by a stranger / when home cannot be / one place or another / cannot be mother or child / we become the levitation itself / wingspan of glass / the burning always somewhere behind us / when i am on my way somewhere / i look over my shoulder / always search the sky for smoke
The loss (of ancestral home) and near-loss (of her mother from the train) have become part of the speaker’s own story and by introducing it here, she is teaching us to interpret the work this book is doing. The body suspended is the mother but it is also the speaker and we understand her ungrounding. In her place, we too would be continually watching for smoke.
Here’s another striking contradiction: that a book about lack is itself layered and rich and threaded through with connections. Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms explores personal and family histories as they have been influenced by Korean creation myth, the Japanese occupation of Korea, pop culture, Christian culture, political unrest, racism, and addiction, among other things. Each hungry ghost poem is informed by what we’ve learned of earlier spirits. In a poem addressing mortality, the speaker describes her Korean as “less intelligible every year,” reminding us of an early poem in which the speaker recites the only Korean phrases she knew as a child:
that hurts / may I
please have strawberries / I don’t understand.
This is what we all say about loss, isn’t it? That it’s painful and that it eludes understanding and that we need a way to stem our hunger, our need. These lines are meaningful within their poem but even more so in the context of the full collection. Glass does this again and again with skill and subtlety, letting poems call and call back to each other in ways that heighten our appreciation of them and reward us for reading the collection as a unified whole.
As much consideration as this book gives to the weight of absence, it is also concerned with how that weight might be carried and endured. We can name the nuances of our grief—let it have a specific shape. We can say true things, Glass shows us, even when they are ugly. We can testify to what we see in the world. In “Moon Lake, 1991,” the speaker, at 14, is sneaking out of her home, running downhill in the dark. The poem ends this way:
I remember thinking this hill & this moon should have a flag, something magnificent & bold. A witness. After all, whole countries have been known to disappear overnight.
She’s referring to Yugoslavia, which split apart in 1992 and was mentioned earlier in the poem. But Glass is also reminding us of the three gone kingdoms to which the speaker belongs and of the other absences she owns as well. The speaker is inherently aware of impermanence. She knows the importance of observing and marking what has been or could be taken away. Could disappear. Though Glass, in this book, is far more than witness. These poems, as they wrestle with deep and often generational sorrow, insist on our honesty—about the times we have “chased sabotage.” The times we have caused harm or seen harm and turned away.
Some losses have such magnitude, no meaning can be made from them. And yet Glass has created moving art in loss’s long aftermath. Through careful attention, she gives us ways to
practice touching the surfaces
of heavy things and letting them go.
She also creates a solidarity among us—the speaker, the writer, the readers. In the book’s final poem, we’re told about a mountain bunny in a Korean nursery rhyme.
In the song, we never find out
if the hare makes it to the summit. Even so, we sing it,
raise our hands, fingers hooked in the shape of ears.
We hop, smile, tell our children to climb,
show them how to lift chestnuts from the ravaged ground.
None of us can remember learning this song,
but all of us know it by heart.
How do we learn hope? To desire higher ground? We know that want by heart, all of us. In its last lines, this grief-steeped collection acknowledges a shared innate belief in the possibility of better. We might ascend the mountain. The ground, though ravaged, might give us something good. We don’t know how the song ends. But we can, Glass tells us, keep raising our hands.
Joan Kwon Glass is a Korean diasporic author, winner of the 2024 Perugia Press Poetry Prize for Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, and author of Night Swim, winner of the Diode Book Prize (Diode Editions, 2022), as well as the chapbooks How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy (Harbor Editions, 2022) and If Rust Can Grow on the Moon (Milk & Cake Press, 2022). Her poems have been featured in The Margins (Asian American Writers’ Workshop), Poetry, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, The Slowdown, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. She lives in coastal Connecticut where she is a public school educator, and she teaches poetry at writing centers throughout the country.
Abbie Kiefer is the author of Certain Shelter (June Road Press, 2024). Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and other places. She is on the staff of The Adroit Journal and lives in New Hampshire. Find her online at abbiekieferpoet.com