Your rating:
In these hybrid poems, Jessica Q. Stark explores her mother’s fraught immigration to the United States from Vietnam at the end of war through the lens of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. Told through personal, national, and cultural histories, Buffalo Girl is a feminist indictment of the violence used to define and control women's bodies. Interspersed throughout this hybrid work are a series of collaged photographs, featuring Stark’s mother’s black-and-white photography from Vietnam beautifully and hauntingly layered over various natural landscapes — lush tropical plants, dense forests, pockets of wildflowers. Several illustrations from old Red Riding Hood children’s books can also be found embedded into these pieces. Juxtaposing the moral implications of Little Red Riding Hood with her mother's photography, Stark creates an image-text conversation that attends to the wolves lurking in the forests of our everyday lives. Opening the whispered frames around sexuality and sex work, immersed in the unflattering symptoms of survival, Buffalo Girl burgeons with matrilineal love and corporeal rage while censuring the white gaze and the violence enacted through the English language. Here is an inversion of diasporic victimhood. Here is an unwavering attention to the burdens suffered by the women of this world. Here is a reimagination, a reclamation, a way out of the woods.
Publication Year: 2023
No posts yet
Kick off the convo with a theory, question, musing, or update
Your rating:
“And how many ways can I break a mask? How many syllables would it take to travel from one’s own stubborn and beastly tongue?” — from the poem, “The Wild Water Buffalo” This book is like a “lesson / in fortitude” as it interweaves the story of Little Red Riding Hood as we known it and as it’s been retold, across different cultures, into her own life. The way the structure of the little girl and the hungry wolf is reworked into the poet’s upbringing, her origin story & her mother’s, and how the poet herself comes of age. “… I don’t know if // I ever found happiness,” she says in one poem that stuns one to a halt. But then the poet gives us the image of feeling like air, free and untouchable and that there is just one of many moments of reclamation that made me feel hopeful of what’s to come. “if something must be taken away, continually, one must learn to cut out its value.” — from the poem, “The Light of the Moon,” & to me it feels like where there is a will, there is a way especially as it concerns securing “safe passage” in order to live another day. To live is to hunger and to be blunt, “we were a fucking wolfpack / for a free sample,” Stark says and later on adds: “I felt so gone I picked my own body’s price (tradition) / (never simple) and danced it near-dead…” “THE NIGHT IS LONG AND I BEAR THE HUNGER. The girl said: I AM HUNGRY, TOO.” — from the poem, “The Tale of the Tiger-Women” Some lines I want to come back to: “And everything even absence / leaves a trace within the body. / And everyone even truth / is their own version of memory.” “For years I ignored the sentence in my body.” “I am not frightened of risks, / but I am afraid of drowning.” “… she said too much, / wanted too little, wasted too much time” “History books are forever / missing the details of unfathomable / loss—“ “we all know there are no true villains — we’re just a bunch of hungry animals.” “What are we, but small creatures avoiding new versions of violence?”
0
© 2024 Pagebound