On a quick pass through the first several poems in Willie Lin’s debut collection, Conversation Among Stones (2023), I somehow formed the impression that Lin rarely used the lyric “I”. When I went back to truly read the book, I saw that I was wrong. “I” appears in most poems, but so obliquely that the “I” itself is almost elided. The result takes the reader right into the title image, a “conversation among stones.” One of the pleasures and challenges of this book is struggling with the speakers to understand who they are and where they locate themselves while we ask ourselves the same questions.
Lin, who was born in Beijing and now lives and works in Chicago, grew up during China’s one-child policy, as she noted during an interview with Four Way Review. That policy began in the aftermath of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, suggesting that Lin’s parents lived through that traumatic time. This must be surmised by the reader because Lin rarely identifies a specific time, place or person in her poems. Violence and displacement stalk the speakers in Lin’s taut poems.
In the pantoum, “Elegy for Misremembered Things,” the first and last lines ask, “What is ordinary sorrow?” The pantoum form’s repetitions intensify the images of a man’s “missing left index finger,” desert sand that “fills your mouth,” and a mother “who strikes your hand as it moves across a cold music, ticking each mistake.” A mother appears again in “The Vocation.” The speaker was “so thin I could have been / my mother in her cotton uniform” in a city that “pushed its agenda of smoke.” As the speaker observes, “There will be a need / for a catalog of such things.”
Lin excels with short poems, which make up most of this collection. This is the entire two-sentence poem, “Memory (Afterwards)”:
Afterwards there was always that weakness
where the bone had been broken. Nothing
could be struck again with the same force.
The line breaks after “weakness” and “Nothing” suspend the reader for a moment. Each line builds in violence, with the poem culminating in the monosyllabic, “force.” The poem is clear as far as it is willing to go. But who was struck and who did the striking? The poem seems tinged with relief and, possibly, regret. Maybe this speaker needs to strike–or strike back–with the “same force,” at least metaphorically. Maybe this book is doing exactly that.
Pain and violence meet in the two-line poem, “Dear”:
A knife pares to learn what is flesh.
What is flesh.
The last line is a statement and a question. What connects an individual, a living consciousness, to the physical world of place or other living beings? One bleak response is nothing. “In the cold, we become less / recognizable,” the speaker says in “Dead Dog,” noting, almost casually, “I am not thinking of human things.” In “Mercy the Horse,” based on a news story about a horse rescued from–of all things–a septic tank, the speaker identifies with the horse: “Such was the way / I went on, afraid to set my weight entire / on the world.”
Lin’s speakers also identify with remnants. The exceptional “Figures in a Landscape,” based on Yves Klein’s fire paintings, opens beautifully: “We were looking for a quiet space / and found it on canvas.” Klein created these paintings with a flamethrower, and in the couplet at the end of this 14-line poem, the speaker, poignantly but alarmingly, would “place us there now, / in the shape and remnant of burning.” The speaker admits, in a theme that runs through the book, “If asked / to describe my ideal occupation, I’d say / being marginalized.”
What lies beneath these impulses to self-erasure? One thread might be seen in another of the book’s most compelling poems, “Object Lesson.” A child takes her mother “to what passed / for a park in the graying city.” The child then intentionally “slipped away / and hid, curious what she [the mother] would do.” The mother calls the child’s name “or what you were to her” and
decided she would keep it–
the anger that was not yet contempt
for you–like a balloon tied to the wrist
casting its little shadow, little stigma.
The child, while not “yet” held in “contempt,” nevertheless has had her status as an object confirmed. Strikingly, this poem can also be read the opposite way, with the mother hiding from the child and the child “not yet” holding the mother in contempt.
The book’s title is taken from one of the book’s longest poems, “Little Fugues,” which is four pages, written in short sections. The first section provides advice:
Go out and do what you love.
It is enough.
Bring all you can carry,
what, in this life, must approximate infinity.
This, of course, is complicated advice. The first two lines could come from an inspirational social media post. The third line appears to be practical advice but then melts into vastness, a vastness limited by “this life” and the precisely-right phrase, “approximate infinity.”
In another section of the poem, unnamed people, except for someone named Greg, are talking about big topics such as God and the soul. Despite the presence of people, “It was a conversation among stones.” In the Four Way interview, Lin said she hoped to use this title to evoke “speaking to the inanimate and what can’t or refuses to speak back.” The poem ends fittingly with this sentence:
It is time
to see in full what you’ve understood only in profile,
turned slightly away, as if
toward a source of light, some idea of god:
Lin tempers any sense of resolution in these lines by ending the poem with a colon. As she puts it in “Teleology (Day by day)”–the italics are hers–”I must thank you for bringing me / to this place, which is still not my destination.” Lin has given her readers the opportunity to discover this place, too. I look forward to continuing this essential work of poetry in the company of Lin’s books yet to come.
Susan Wheatley‘s poems have been published in the Seattle Review, Stand (in the UK), the St. Ann’s Review, the Cincinnati Review and other magazines. She also reviews poetry books. Susan lives in Cincinnati where she practices probate law.
