REVIEW : THE WAY BACK / EDWARD GUNAWAN
When a book is purchased through one of our reviews, round-ups (etc.) we receive an affiliate commission.
The Way Back
Edward Gunawan
Reviewed by
Anna Laura Reeve
Edward Gunawan’s collection The Way Back is a triumph of hybridity poetry—a collection of forms and structures that align fragmented experience into something that has a direction, that forms an electrified current, that points.
The book’s hybrid format is surprising and inventive, with essay-like prose following blocks of linked prose poems, and more traditionally-formatted poems scattered throughout. I think this unpredictable mixing and morphing of forms can reflect the active and intelligent responses necessary for the disenfranchised, like the queer immigrant in these poems, giving it a sense of always-shifting balance, and hypervigilant awareness of the self in the environment. These in-between spaces allow for flexibility, pivoting, and the opportunity to approach moments of great suffering and rigidity with the possibility of alternative outcomes.
“Insufferable Joy,” a list poem of brief, justified paragraphs, looks at a queer wedding announcement in a conservative Indonesian family through a series of media formats, from documentary to novel to rom-com. The speaker frames the scene over and over, considering it as it is, as it happened, and by working it into different shapes, he makes what was rigid, moldable—these shifting perspectives allow us to pepper the foregone conclusion with darts of imagination. This is the mechanism that allows for cultural change, and while “Insufferable Joy” centers the truth of what happened, a scene of devastating parental/cultural rejection and alienation, it embodies an insistence that joy is recognized.
The collection centers the speaker’s identity as a queer immigrant in America, and therefore doubly an outsider, early on. “Love Refugees,” a striking poem at the opening of the book, opens on an inner environment in which the speaker’s queerness is not only powerfully stigmatized in his conservative Chinese-Indonesian family’s home culture, but in American culture as well, where a similarly-othered identity of “refugee” or “immigrant” work together to threaten, isolate, and starve. The poem’s use and repetition of “we” recalls the preamble to the US Constitution, but the mirror shows an inverted image: “We who broke our names to fit the contours and curls of their / mouths; who spoke our mother tongues with shame and / celebrated our New Year in secret” and “We who rolled our windows up and shut the doors / double-barred; who kept them out by locking ourselves in” becomes “We are panhandlers really. Begging for the loose change of / democracy” (2).
“Chlorine Chronicles,” “The Way Back,” and “A Feast for Amah” also play with prose poetic forms, and their use of image, fragrance, taste, and texture make them some of my favorites in the collection. Long lines, justified to fill straight-sided text blocks, create a predictable but liminal space—like a home, or the imagination—allowing for a smoothly flowing line. Prose poetry is well-suited to narrative pieces like these, where the smell of chlorine links smoothly and immediately to memories of swim team and a sexual awakening, or (in “A Feast for Amah”) the childhood snacks made by a grandmother that weave seamlessly into memories of her, and the speaker’s childhood as a whole. They’re well-crafted and musical as he recalls the affectionate but unspoken connections that held the family together.
The final poem in the collection, “Sign Post,” offers a vision of story—the stories we construct from the fragments of our lives, to satisfy our hunger for the linear and to give ourselves a shape—as snake skins: shed when no longer useful, or when they stifle growth. Borrowing from a Natalie Diaz poem, Gunawan uses the image of a glittering snakeskin draped over a tree branch,
so they scale with light
to catch the eyes
of those who will come after
to continue the fight
This powerful closer beats warm with generosity, as does each poem in the collection, no matter how blunt their reflections on suffering. Simple and elegant, it frames past lives and histories as dead, no longer a part of a living body, but an enduring and beautiful imprint of a life, a marker left behind to encourage and embolden those coming after. Meanwhile, the living snake moves forward into a future where it is becoming more and more itself. Gunawan’s compassionate, articulate work will certainly function as a sign post of hope for both young writers and people struggling to navigate toward a life and identity that feels like home.
The Way Back by Edward Gunawan is out from Foglifter Press, October 30th.
Anna Laura Reeve is a writer living in Tennessee.
