RavePoetry FoundationHong’s poetry creates whole worlds, instead of being satisfied with representing a small sliver of this one or this I. The book’s second part describes an imaginary Chinese city called Shangdu that mirrors its contemporary real-life counterparts: factories, workers, pollution, and the dream of purchasing a piece of paradise as summed up in the title of the poem \'Market Forces Are Brighter Than the Sun.\' The language and imagery in this section are as inventive as ever (including a satirical riposte to Coleridge’s \'Kubla Khan\'), even if the tone is a bit more serious ... Engine Empire ends (while the engine of empire grinds on) with a lyrical suite of poems conjuring an increasingly virtual reality in direct proportion to the destruction of our shared material one.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips
RaveBookforumHeaven exists as a series of displacements. Its voice inhabits various languages—English, Greek, Spanish, French, Italian—and locations: Los Angeles, the Colorado Rockies, ancient Troy, Paris, New York City. This elusiveness, this refusal of hardened categories and identities, is a poetics of resistance built into speaking, one that, like creole, blends many tongues ... it’s the backdrop—the constellation, one might say—for the structural inequalities, whether economic or racial, of the present moment, and Phillips peers to its horizons. Yet he does so in a way that keeps them expanding, never allowing poetry to clamp down ... Equally important is Phillips’s emphasis on letting the strange remain strange, letting difference remain difference, because social and political progress entails learning to speak across differences as much as similarities.
