Cathy Park Hong’s third collection of poems, Engine Empire, is remarkable in its scope—of historicity, sound, and its view of human potentiality. Written in three sections of separate but related poems, the book moves through the California immortalized by old Westerns; a fictional Chinese city placed in present-day; and finally ends in the “far future.”  The “fiction-ing” of Engine Empire along with its movement through time—the Western cowboy past of the first section, the technological modernity of a fake city in the second, and the watery, sci-fi distancing of the last section—places the collection in our consciousness as legend and warning, as history and possibility.

The second section, entitled “Shangdu, My Artful Boomtown!” presents the fictional city in China that we are told is loosely based on modern-day Shenzhen, a place undergoing extreme, almost violently fast change. The particular appeal of the second section is in the language’s texture. This is felt most intensely in a set of prose descriptions under the title “Adventures in Shangdu.” The ten pages, mostly packed with two descriptions on a page, act as glimpses into life in Shangdu.  The readers’ senses are flooded with imagery: “Vendors line the promenade … they sell pinwheels, pancakes and roast meats of all kinds, even sticks of prickly little seahorses.” The prose poems rotate around living in a “Lucky Highrise Apartment 88.” 88 is a particularly fortuitous number in Chinese; in Mandarin, the character for ‘8’ bears sound echoes of the characters that imply wealth. The poems are buoyant in tone, but what they reveal inside are suicides and death, intense surveillance of citizens in the community, the often un-humanizing social tensions caused by too-rapid industrialization and the reach of cultural imperialism:

    Officials used to dump all the cripples from the Capital into Shangdu. Now that     Shangdu is booming, they have rounded all the cripples and exiled them to a        remote outpost up north. That outpost is also beginning to boom. 
                                        (from ”Of the Old Ukrainian Embassy That Will Be Torn                                         Down for the Hanger Factory”)

Hong’s form of using the prose poem as flash fiction and/or film vignette is not particularly revolutionary, but it is highly effective for this section in particular, where the disconnect between humanness and humanity is most highlighted. Men are presented as interchangeable with machines, and machines are elevated to the level of man:

    When Officials ignored their strike, the crane operators decided to be more         aggressive. They worked all night. The next morning, train carriages, buses,         limousines, bicycles, boats, and even helicopters swung lazily in the wind,             magnetized by cranes. Negotiate, they cried, and we will free your vehicles.”                          (from ”Of the World’s Largest Multilevel Parking Garage”)

In the third section, a collection of second-person poems brings characters that peer at us eerily from the future, and though the collection is set up chronologically, moving from past to present to future, nothing is ever truly left behind. The last section sees Hong turn personalities from the first two into specters:

    Lately, you’ve been fascinated by a user-generated hologram:

    an ethnically ambiguous boy who pretends to drop dead from a shoot-out.

    The boy wakes up when his mother comes home.

    She scolds him and turns off the camera.

    You blink to go offline.

Then in a later poem:

    You wake up from a nap.

    Your mouth feels like a cheap acrylic sweater.

    You blink online and 3-D images hopscotch around you. … After your husband     went on roam, you received one message from him:

    I am by a pond and a coyote is eating a frog. It is amazing.

What is amazing is not the strange synesthesia of a “mouth feel[ing] like a cheap acrylic sweater” or that human beings “blink online” and go “on roam,” but that there are, in this un-real reality, still ponds, and coyotes, and frogs. What do we do with a world that is both beyond human but still operating within the simplest law of nature: survival?

Hong’s skill with wordplay and sound is admirably virtuosic; the first section’s “Ballad in A,” “Ballad in O,” and “Ballad in I” are obvious poems in which Hong’s words dance off each other with such ease it’s almost tempting to skim through them: “O Boomtown’s got lots of sordor:/ odd horrors of throwdowns,/ bold cowboys lock horns, forlorn hobos plot to rob/ pts of gold, loco mobs …”  or “Marshal’s a marksman, maps Kansan’s track/ calm as a shaman, sharp as a hawk,/ says that dastard Kansan’s had/ and gnaws fatback.” But not surprisingly, taking the time to work through the poem yields what makes much of Engine Empire appealing – the discord that lies just beneath. Reading these ballads aloud prove more difficult than tongue twister; there is something discomfiting about the way the vowels knock against each other, the way one possible sound of the vowels scrape against other possible sounds of the vowels, like each word is locking horns with the next and refusing to let go. The poems transform: the eye expects the vowel repetition to sound as pleasing as it looks, and once this is disputed by the ear (and the tongue in vocalizing the words), the jarring competition between tones, sounds, words on the page, becomes almost unbearable.

But the unbearable is effective; there is something post-human about Hong’s Engine Empire, in the descriptions of surveillance and performance, and the way the subjectivity of Hong’s poems throughout the collection refuses to be pinned down. She works "we" into "I" into "you" and back out again: “I suffer a different kind of loneliness” or “We lost a brother, axed in the head by a rancid trapper,/ so we pluck one boy from the litter.” And as Hong reminds us in “Fort Ballads” of the first section, with subjectivity, there is relationality;

    “All around us forts lie built and unbuilt, half-

    walled towns as men yoke themselves to state,

    but we brothers are heading through fields of blue rye and plains

    scullground to silt sand” (“Fort Ballads,” 19)

What of the motion from “built” to “unbuilt” to “built,” and what of the yoking when the yoking will cause us to become undone? This is the United States, and it’s the Twenty-First Century. What is engine and what is empire, and which one is at the heart of the other? Engine Empire is concerned about our collective humanity, our possession of citizen-ness and nationhood. Ownership and responsibility of actions elide; they are cast aside, ignored, and eventually, by the last section, somehow acknowledged and relegated to a minor shadow status—an uncomfortable memory no one wants to talk about, and so by not talking about it, did it happen at all? Engine Empire may simultaneously deconstruct and reconstruct empire as activity as well as structure, bringing us to question what happens to our human-ness as it leads us toward the boundaries of humanity. ~AVW

The “ghoul” (Chicago Review), “phallus-man” (Boston Review), “Laureate of the Louche” (New York Times) “a rampaging steroid-cocktail of a poet,” (Chicago Tribune) are but a few of the epithets given Frederick Seidel, the author of fifteen books of poetry, including Nice Weather, published in September by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.  Seidel’s station in contemporary poetry is a curious one; he is known yet unknown; he avoids readings, seminars, signings, educational institutions and any other outpost of literary convention.  But there is nothing elusive about his poetry, which chronicles his love affairs, political views and his penchant for fast vehicles with an audacious flair:

            I impersonate myself and here I am,
            Prick pointing to the moon, teeth sunk into your calf.
            I ought to warn the concrete that my passion dooms the dam.
            The poem I’m writing looks up at me and starts to laugh.
                                                                                   (from “Rome”)

The poems in “Nice Weather” retain the same cocksure, pointillistic voice that Seidel has developed over the last half century.  His lyrics often rhyme and he continues to capitalize the first letter in each line, but this collection feels loose, both formally and tonally.  Part of this owes to the subject matter of the seventy-three year old Seidel, who writes not only of beautiful women and motorcycles, but also about the death of friends, poor health and the convolutedness of race and patriotism in a post 9-11 America.  In the poem “The Yellow Cab,” Seidel goes as far as to identify with a Muslim terrorist:

            Tree-lined side streets make me lonely.
            Many-windowed town houses make me sad.
            The nicest possible spring day, like today, only
            Ignites my inner suicide-bomber jihad. 

“The Yellow Cab” is not the only poem where Seidel takes on the persona of a terrorist: 

            Now it’s time for the plane I’m on to come down
            In pieces of women and men.
            The anxiety increases in Yemen when
            They pat me down in case I have something under my Muslim gown.

Not only does Seidel seem to sympathize somewhat with the terrorist, the title of the poem above is “Baudelaire,” as if juxtaposing historical and cultural notions of an artist/poet on that of a terrorist: the ultimate outsiders.

Much has been said of Seidel’s treatment of the female sex in his poetry.  Take the poem “Hair in a Net,” from his 1993 collection, My Tokyo.  The poem begins unforgettably with the line, “Every man’s a rapist until he’s done.”  While that sentiment seems to be the gist of the otherwise graceful poem (written in polished tercets), Seidel juxtaposes the “rapist” with images of Jesus Christ and suicide:

            Oh, the tiny furs and the red stench of the fox
            Of all those white girls taking cold showers
            And then lining up to jump
            Hair in a net in a hat over perfectly maintained fences.
            Everything male is a rapist, certainly God,
            Except for Henry James.  

The writer provokes, but can’t carry through; Seidel’s lyrics are only offensive to a point, after which he often swerves away into satire (“except for Henry James.”)  There is an amazing duplicity in Seidel’s writing—he is a misogynist but an elegant one; he is a nihilist but a romantic one; he is suicide case, but one that makes us laugh.  It is a duplicity that stems from his ability to step outside his own persona, this cold distance where he writes from that lends his poems a type of silliness:

            The second woman shines my shoes.
            The other takes my order, curtseys.  Thank you, sir.
            Others stand there in the rain so I can mount them when I choose.
            It’s how protective I
            Can be that keeps them going.  Look at her:
            She clicks her heels together, bowing slightly.  Try
            To put yourself in her shoes: boots, garter belt, and veil.
            She’s amused
            To be a piece of tail. 
                                                            (from “iPhoto”)

In Nice Weather Seidel proves that he is still the Père Provocateur of American poetry. ~TSJ