Review by Erica Goss
In then telling be the antidote, Xiao Yue Shan embodies the persona of a restless traveler, a crosser of oceans and cultures on a quest to build coherence from the myriad impressions flowing through her poetic filters. These are poems of movement and edgy invention, delivering insights into subjects as wide-ranging as colonialism, exile, desire and place. Memory’s undercurrent circulates throughout the collection, illuminating the past and connecting intercontinental distances.
Shan possesses an eye for fluidly constructed, deeply affecting scenes, as in “exodus hong kong.” A poem in eleven parts, “exodus” declares, “listen carefully—there is land or there is water,” and Shan’s exhortation to listen carefully is proven out as the poem unfolds, leaping from mountains to mangroves:
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at the red marks of painted
stone, by the mangroves there,
I watched once a child searching
the pockets of his father
who laid perfectly still in the summer stones,
mouth filling with the rising river.
The poem imparts a tone of secrecy, of explaining an essential, terrifying truth to an innocent while preparing that person as quickly as possible for the true state of things. Shan warns, “across / shenzhen bay, there will be men scanning the paths, / so send your body low and fast / into the long taste of salt, the sea—.” As this journey progresses, desperate measures become necessary: “dandelion, banana skins, the stems of sweet potatoes, to boil / the roots of a mountain fern…/ bright scream of hunger ripping the body / into constellations, famine has a smell.” In the fifth and sixth sections, the poem moves from instruction to witness as its focus changes to the grim record of a fleeing population’s desperation: “it was better when / the people you loved stopped looking / like themselves, like watching a stranger die.”
Geography plays an important role in this book. As Shan crosses and returns, she traverses physical and emotional landscapes, rendering Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing dreamlike and vivid. In these poems, place is an entity alive with its own desires, motivations, and consequences. Shan observes how cities continually destroy and rebuild themselves, taking their human inhabitants with them. In “maps,” she writes of this dual activity:
at the intersection of desire I want to tear down the small house
where I’ve lived a long time…
I want my body
to stay a body. I don’t want it revealed as architecture, constitutions
of willow-wood and heaven-will, vague orchards, glistening black
stars of apple-seed.
When Shan voices this wish, she alerts us to the danger in over-identifying with any one place, and how that action leads to “a safe prison to dream of boundlessness from.” The human-built environment can only take us so far before it becomes a stifling trap.
Places are also political, steeped in the history and struggles of their time, a topic Shan returns to throughout the book. Issues of wealth, poverty and access to power, as well as the endless efforts to crack the codes to success, are the themes of “wealth distribution will not be considered in the economic reform.” Here we learn that “the get rich schemes in china / always started with two men sitting / on some battered patio over an oil-slick / of a tablecloth.” The poem lays bare the black market economy that continues unabated, regardless of the directive set forth in the poem’s title. Its perils loom large in the lives of its citizens:
the trigger that twitches—this close to a bicycle
for your wife. this close to a couple months
of rent. this close to cottoning the quilts
for winter and tangerines every summer night.
Such is the heavy cost of survival, “swallowing men whole,” “haunted / in gold.”
“Witness” hinges on the imbalance in relationships between the powerful and their subordinates: “a spectator and a combatant,” and the emotional toll of this constant struggle: “the light being turned off so as to finally sleep.” Shan sharply delineates the line between victim and perpetrator: “there is someone to commit the act and someone who cries / enough.” The poem ends with a warning about the dangers of propaganda:
there’s never any news coming from the other side,
save for some enormous music
we all cup our ears to hear.
Two poems, “the man I love ran off with everything except my poems” and “eve on a one night stand” delve into the conundrums that characterize intimate relationships, whether lasting or brief. In “the man I love,” the image of a door, what Shan calls “a fiction of the thought,” represents the way time slows during a painful event. As the man in question moves closer to leaving, the speaker observes certain truths about doors: “doors are a fact / of their swinging,” and “a door can only ever be / open or closed, never neither.” His impending departure creates an inner conflict in the speaker, as bit by bit she reclaims herself from the relationship:
in a book about love gertrude stein
says that her portrait from picasso is the only reproduction
which is always I. I, I want to take I, back from I. from
your eye of doors which lead powerfully into silence.
“Sex is no sin / and no absolution,” Shan writes in “eve on a one night stand.” The poem describes a night in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo where the speaker takes on the persona of the biblical Eve. This Eve does not shy away from gratification, responding to the lure of “ripe cloying pleasures:”
I touched the fruit, and I knew
it rotten: shame, the last of evils. yet I crossed
nothing in divinity, and the non-possessed
never believe in possession.
The randomness of possibility seduces Eve—“the unripe aroma of circumstantial / intimacy,” and the availability of “a man who refused to say his real name.” She understands the brief connection she’s about to make for exactly what it is, in spite of fleeting second thoughts: “I only knew I had the desire / to wander, and that I had said yes / when perhaps I had meant to say no.” And yet, she needs this one-night stand to recover something in her that’s missing, even as she watches the nameless man leave her: “I arrived / closer to myself, on my solitary way.”
Shan, like the Eve of “eve on a one night stand” may find herself at a loss when contemplating the aftermath of such a brief connection, but she has no hesitation when it comes to constructing poems that swirl down the page, filled with images tumbling through subtly sculpted lines, with a momentum at times exhilarating and at others overwhelming. Her skill is evident in the poem “only in silent shadows and in dreams,” which begins, “how externalities are internalities resolved.” The poem explores the birth of ideas, their adrenaline-charged beginnings “when suddenly things are possible…// and in the violence of idea comes a perfect counterpart, / blown in from a lifetime of foliage, streets, / sorrow, and solace.” Shan reminds us that these moments of clarity and insight are what will ultimately save us:
the fractures we fill in
golden with recollection, for what else stands a chance
on the battleground of daily things—dictatorial traffic lights
and wilting stalks under supermarket glare—if not
a fragrance, a piece of music, a strong-handed colour…
compelling it to the page, granting it visible.
A few of the poems in this book continue over several pages, weaving threads of memory, experience, geography and emotional resonance into dreamlike, stream-of-consciousness artifacts. “Striations” begins with an impressionistic description of Tokyo:
battered clouds, animal sky, tokyo
paints cubist, sending the day to us
in shards, tile, orange, porcelain,
dark glyphs of telephone wire
crafting inky pictures amidst
sangenjaya’s low, silent roofs
This gradual opening sets the stage for a series of unfolding images, portrayed in precise language. The speaker, watching from her window of perception, constructs a vibrant picture for the reader from the “beautiful compact darkness:”
now, I can say then as if it were
still. such is the heaven of images—
elements abiding their perfection.
The city is a living, breathing entity. Its juxtapositions create an ever-changing mosaic:
how often beauty comes to resemble
surrender. like rhododendrons, neon
taxi skids, bracing teeth of ivy.
In these lines, we see the urban landscape filtered through the compression of the poet’s lens as she selects and combines the images surrounding her. As if she were commenting on a series of disciplines, Shan describes the mindset needed to survive in that place of constant stimulus; for example, “how one trains in that great art, / patience, not conquering outward / but tunneling within” and “the imagination of directions.”
In spite of its length, “striations” keeps its energy. Shan delivers punchy, thought-provoking lines such as “we’d go bad going on forever” and “keeping its cindered shimmer / in diagrammed sentences.” The poem rises and falls on ecstatic language: “the sailing boundary between / your language and mine practices / its peaks and hallucinations, geometries and theologies” yet manages to remain grounded. As Shan brings the poem to a close, we settle into a comfortable place, “holding one another,” where the “ancient questions…/ do not hesitate to land.”
As she writes in “striations,” Shan is “seeking wonders / of the unmysterious kind, wherein / the distant and minute grows / larger and more daunting as one / unthinkingly approaches them.” In this book, she is in the world but not of it, casting herself in the role of solitary observer. She does so with a collection of poems as carefully rendered as sculptures. Filled with details both delicate and devastating, then telling be the antidote is a bildungsroman in verse, the story of a young woman’s growth and acceptance of a world filled with confusion and beauty.
Xiao Yue Shan was born in China and lives on Vancouver Island. then telling be the antidote won the Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize and was published in 2023. Her chapbook, How Often I Have Chosen Love won the Frontier Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published in 2019. She has received the New Millennium Award for Poetry and the Juxtaprose Poetry Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, the Artlyst Art to Poetry Award, and the Ambit Poetry Competition. Poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Poetry Northwest, and more. Prose works have appeared in Granta, Cleveland Review of Books, Socrates on the Beach, 3:AM Magazine, Electric Literature, The Shanghai Literary Review, and more. Poem-films have shown in London, Vienna, New York City, and Athens. Her work has been supported by the Canadian Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, and Arts Council Tokyo. She translates from the Chinese and acts as editor-in-chief of the Chinese-English bilingual literary journal, Spittoon Literary Magazine. She also edits the Asymptote Journal blog and Cicada.
Erica Goss is the author of Night Court, winner of the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press, and Landscape With Womb and Paradox, forthcoming from Broadstone Books.. She has received numerous Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations, as well as a 2023 Best American Essay Notable. Recent and upcoming publications include The Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Oregon Humanities, Creative Nonfiction, North Dakota Quarterly, Gargoyle, Spillway, West Trestle, A-Minor, Redactions, Consequence, The Sunlight Press, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review, and Critical Read. Erica served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California, from 2013-2016. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she teaches, writes and edits the newsletter Sticks & Stones.