cover image Standing Water

Standing Water

Eleanor Chai. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23 (91p) ISBN 978-0-374-26948-7

In this raw, confessional debut, Chai confronts the specter of an absence—that of her mother, who was committed to a psychiatric facility shortly after Chai’s birth. In the book’s devastating title poem, the poet’s father reveals details of his daughter’s origin and her mother’s postpartum depression, and Chai recalls acts of violence from an older brother angry at their mother’s departure. Chai continually laments her imagination’s inability to bring her mother back: “I thought I could do it: body you forth/ create/make a formal being shapely enough/ to restore you to some life.” She further laments an alienating language gap, having spoken Korean in her early childhood while living with her grandparents before returning to her father and brothers who spoke only English—“the evacuation of my native tongue left me raw.” Ill-equipped to deal with the evidence of her mother’s mental health, she is both attracted to and repulsed by photographs that were “forebodingly strange, then utterly native.” Convictions shift from this unbreachable distance: “Was she actually frightening, or was she scary/ because she was unspeakable, broken,/ fringe and the beginning of me.” Chai finds some measure of peace, and though the void can never be overcome, the struggle unfurls as a beautiful catharsis—haunting, suffocating, and stunningly rendered. (Apr.)