Focal Point by Jenny Qi Review by Angelo Mao

Focal Point by Jenny Qi

Steel Toe Books

October 2021

ISBN 978-1-949540-26-0

87 pages

Book Review by Angelo Mao

A “focal point,” the title of Jenny Qi’s first collection of poetry, is the location where rays of light converge. In microscopy, samples are positioned at the focal point, where focused light can illuminate details too small to be seen by the unaided eye. In a research setting, the sample is often treated to be fluorescent; this means it will “glow,” emitting its own light once struck by incident rays.

In Qi’s collection, the unexpected death of her mother from cancer is the focal event. Like a fluorescent sample, it accepts the light that strikes it from the author’s inquiring gaze and emits its own light in reply. In Qi’s case, this illumination recolors multiple aspects of her life: from her identity as a research scientist (Qi earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco), to her Chinese-American cultural heritage, and to her understanding of her parents.

Although the book roughly traces an arc that enacts illness, loss, and bereavement, the speaker begins with poems set in the days surrounding her mother’s death. “The Last Visitation” is a deft and wrenching account the speaker’s decision to take her mother off life support:

………………………Is she in pain? What should I do?

………………………Morphine? Morphine.

………………………My father’s words a drumbeat.

………………………She want to live, and you don’t let her.

The high proportion of lines that are spoken by others or are diegetic formally enacts the speaker’s numbness, and contrasts with the active role the speaker plays in deciding the course of her mother’s care. But subsequent poems are situated elsewhere in time, creating a panoramic sketch of her mother before illness. For example, “Little Fires” recounts the speaker’s childhood memory of her mother; “Dissonance” describes the discord over the long marriage of the speaker’s mother and father. The effect of this arrangement is to shadow all the later poems with the mother’s death. In “Little Fires,” for instance, the memory becomes a double loss: of a time that has passed, and of a person who no longer exists.

After this first section, the poems of the second section zoom into the period of the mother’s illness, and enact an attempt to frame and understand the mother’s illness using scientific knowledge and practice. Poems that continue to detail the mother’s life—employment at a casino, exposed to second-hand “black cigarette smoke” (“Casino”); the trajectory of an unfulfilling marriage (“Penelope Looks Back”)—are interspersed with enumerated, haiku-like poems, such as “Biology Lesson 1”: 

………………………Cells need touch—

………………………isolated cells wither,

………………………float away

………………………in a blood-red sea.

However, the speaker seems to realize that these scientific “lessons” are unable to decelerate or provide meaning to her mother’s illness. “Possibilities,” a numbered list of lurid and seemingly improbable ways to die (“2. Falling down seven flights of stairs into a room full of squashed- / faced cats that swarm to devour your toes, your eyes.”), parodies the scientific method of hypothesis formulation and testing by mixing fiction with “fact” (Aeschylus’s death-by-tortoise). Yet the list ends with its most mundane, yet shocking, prediction: “14. In a grey hospital room, wearing a white plastic wristband, your eyes / turned towards fluorescent lights.” The effect is to underline the inability of scientific reasoning to protect the speaker from the traumas associated with death.

Months after her mother’s death—which seems to occur in the silence between sections two and three of the book’s four, its “focal point”—the speaker becomes ill and requires hospitalization. In “Normal,” the speaker describes how this brush with death, reminiscent of Odysseus’s and Aeneas’s visits to Hades, facilitates an encounter with a deceased parent. The immediacy of this encounter is underscored by the second person address to the speaker’s mother, in contrast to the third person used in earlier sections:

………………………Mama, I finally get it,

………………………why those surgeries broke you.

………………………Why you were so cross about living

………………………even as you did everything to live.

………………………But at the same time I don’t,

………………………because I’ll recover.

After this encounter, it is empathy and attention to a shared cultural heritage that, in the remaining sections, enable progression towards healing. In “Call & Response,” Qi translates a poem by the famous Song dynasty poet Su Shi written after his wife’s death, and appends an imagined heartfelt reply by the wife. In “Commonalities,” the speaker, while at a gay pride parade, realizes that her grief has given her a tool to empathize with even the worst of humanity (in this case, Omar Mateen, responsible for the Orlando nightclub shooting):

………………………I remember how it felt to reach

………………………for comfort and fail and keep failing,

………………………sometimes fall so low you want

………………………to pull someone else with you.

………………………I remember grief as a hollow,

………………………so sharp it felt like hunger,

………………………so large I felt exceptional.

This turn to the societal is accompanied by an expanded understanding of how the speaker’s cultural background is entangled with science as a discipline. In “Decision-Making,” Qi writes about Gang Lu, a Chinese national and physics student who, after being denied a prestigious prize for his dissertation at the University of Iowa, killed the advising committee in a murder-suicide. For Lu, like for Qi’s father and many first-generation immigrants from Asia, scientific aptitude paved the way for entry into United States and provided the most tractable blueprint for success. However, in parallel with the inability of the speaker’s scientific training to alter the outcome of her mother’s illness, science could (and can) provide these immigrants with scant protection from hostile prejudice and alienation. This connects, in “About Face,” to the recent increases in anti-Asian racism during the pandemic: “I’d almost forgotten / I will never belong here.”

The last poem, “Contingencies,” finds the speaker firmly focused on the present but haunted by the past:

………………………Everywhere somewhere is burning

………………………and it’s too late to look back.

………………………I wake up in the dark smell smoke

………………………so familiar I don’t think twice.

………………………Some nights I wake with a start—here, look

………………………at all these photos I haven’t scanned.

………………………*

………………………Clear my throat of dust again

………………………these days inescapable. I imagine

………………………my lungs black like a chimney,

………………………think of city haze so thick

………………………it could not be measured, the scale

………………………of these days beyond conceiving—

Typical of Qi’s poems, and indicative of the remarkable coherence of the collection as a whole, the effect of the poem is amplified by considering it in context. The speaker is concerned, ostensibly, with the California wildfires, which have produced hazardous air quality throughout the state. But the “everywhere” extrapolates to climate change, and to the past itself: “too late to look back” applies equally to our planetary trajectory as to the speaker’s regrets about her mother. The “photos” (presumably of the speaker’s mother) waiting to be “scanned” eerily mimic the “lungs [blackened]” by pollution, which “scan” and imprint the present, and also connect to the carcinogenic “black cigarette smoke” in earlier poems. Grief, like the echoes within and between Qi’s poems, like the body itself, remains the pervasive element of the present, even as it recedes into the past.

Angelo Mao is a research scientist. He received his PhD in bioengineering from Harvard University. His first book of poems is Abattoir (Burnside Review Press, 2021), and his work has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Lana Turner, and elsewhere. He has also reviewed for Opera News and Boston Classical Review.

17 November 2021