“The synthesis is remarkable plotting, an expose on a (d)evolution of civilization and the victim idiocy which impels it.”

Stark, prophetic, vulnerable. Cathy Park Hong offers us three “chapters” of human experience, settled into folklore and alienation, ironically limited and yet full and tragic in those limitations. Together she offers parables of colonization and barbarity in otherness, of industrialization and “humanity as resource,” of that final privation when a digital age erases an already fading identity. And she does each in diction and verse which itself mirrors the failings of its speakers.

This is no traditional poetic collection; much is challenging to puzzle through, but apart from the individual chapters/titles which each offer a graphic scenario of moment, the synthesis is remarkable plotting, an expose on a (d)evolution of civilization and the victim idiocy which impels it. The totality is dizzying, and I will be thinking of this work for some time, and seeking more of Hong’s writing.