Book Review: Split by Cathy Linh Che

Split
Poems by Cathy Linh Che
Alice James Books, May 2014
ISBN-13:978-1938584053
$15.95; 87 pp.
Reviewed by Stephanie Barbé Hammer

Perhaps the writer’s most difficult task is to render the catastrophic linked non-stories that comprise transgenerational trauma. Cathy Linh Che’s collection SPLIT accomplishes this nearly impossible challenge with uncommon grace and power. Each poem unwinds the cataclysm of personal wounding by making itself irresistibly beautiful. The opening lines are seductive lures, to whose language we attach ourselves, only to be dragged upstream into a whirlpool of domestic deception and horror. Che’s work opens out to her mother’s tortuous needlework in Vietnam, to the death of her grandmother, and in a moment of absurdity to her father’s double role as refugee/actor:

While in the refugee camp in the Philippines/my parents were hired as extras/for the movie Apocalypse Now/That’s me driving, my father tells me/When I look hard, I can see him/in a white helmet, dressed as a Viet Cong.

Circling around multiple unspeakables, Che’s voice doubles back through her and her family’s histories. But the collection eventually hurtles forward through time, even as it carries the images of the past with it. The final poems dramatize the poem’s ability to transform the poet—and by extension, us—through the matching modalities of memory and imagination. “I too can change,” the poet tells us. And we believe her because we have been partners on a truly remarkable poetic journey.

Descended from Norwegian plumbers on one side, and bohemian Russian aristocrats on the other, Stephanie Barbé Hammer has published short fiction in The Bellevue Literary Review, Pearl, NYCBigCityLit, and the Hayden’s Ferry Review among other places. A 4-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, Stephanie is also a nonfiction writer and poet; her prose poem chapbook Sex with Buildings, appeared with Dancing Girl Press in 2012 and a full length collection, How Formal? was published in Spring 2014 with Spout Hill Press. Her novel The Puppet Turners of Narrow Interior is forthcoming with Urban Farmhouse Press.