Undercurrents

Wong's deeply personal collection is a powerful undertow of a book. Focusing on water, she charts a course of ecological poetry through tangled personal reflection, environmental and social conscience, and memoir. The visual storytelling%E2%80%94through stunning layout choices, illustrations, and a single photograph%E2%80%94has a powerful effect. The mixed media approach gives the poetry a fluid quality that effectively highlights the book's exploratory prose, lending an allusion to flow and bodies of water in placement and presentation of text. A fluidity is felt too in Wong's blending of her own cultural experience with those of indigenous nations in Canada, whose presence and experiences permeate the book. Wong's notes, directly set into the text, accompany and become part of the poems themselves, and the list of "References and Influences" further serves to underscore that this is a work with wide-ranging depths. It is, in many ways, more of an immersion experience than a text, and as such it is highly recommended. (July)