Including poetry projects, a chapbook and incidental poems previously
published in magazines and by small presses, is a door makes use of
the poem's ability for "suddenness" to subvert closure: the sudden
question, the sudden turn, the sudden opening--writing that is generated
from linguistic mindfulness, improvisation, compositional
problem-solving, collaborative events, travel, investigation and
documentary--in short, poetry as practice.
Part one, "Isadora Blue," is grounded in the author's encounter with the
smashed and broken doors along the hurricane-devastated waterfront of
Telchac Puerto, a small village on the north coast of the Yucatán
Peninsula. It resonates throughout the other three sections of the book,
with its attention to hybridity and "between-ness"--a poetic
investigation of racialized otherness--and the composition of "citizen"
and "foreigner" through history and language.
Part two of this series of poems, "Ethnogy Journal," written during a
trip to Thailand and Laos in 1999, hinges around aspects of "tourist"
and "native." Here the poems play in the interstices of spectacle, food
and social sightseeing.
Much of this poetry is framed by Wah's acute sense of the marginalized
non-urban local "place" and coloured by his attempt to articulate senses
of otherness and resistance, or writing the "public self," particularly
in the book's third section, "Discount Me In"--a series of sixteen poems
from his discursive poetic essay "Count Me In."
The fourth section, "Hinges," is tinted with portraits of the social
subject mired in a diasporic mix, a metanarrative trope in Fred Wah's
work that began with Breathin' My Name With a Sigh.
Characteristically playful and compositionally musical, this is poetry
that watches both sides of the doorway: unsettled, unpredictable, closed
and open. Sometimes the door swings and can be kicked. Sometimes it's
simply missing. Sometimes it's a sliding door.
