PositiveThe Hong Kong Review of BooksIt is, unsurprisingly, a book full of death, of questions of translation and translinguality, and of testing the relationship between words and the world ... The poems of the first half of Be With establish the thesis of the book, on how a poet’s mourning a poet questions the word’s ability to translate the world. Their referents are less clear than in the poems that follow—and for this reason, they both address the underlying question of the relationship between words and the world and also seem addressed to the poet’s deceased wife. The poetry tells us how to read it ... these poems also swarm with insects and arachnids, a detail I cannot figure out.
