Asylum (review)

Like objects suspended in amber, scraps of history surface and resurface throughout Quan Barry's Asylum. Fractured lives, histories, and speech are recurrent features of this collection, with many poems derived in one way or another from the poet's personal history. But these are ghost conversations as much as autobiographical poems—born in Saigon, the child of an African-American serviceman and a Vietnamese mother, Barry's own history is inextricably bound with world events, and her strongest works explore some of the accidents and planned disasters of history.

The poet addresses some figures directly, situating them in menacing landscapes that have the qualities of memory and dream. In the poem, "the exile," part of a longer sequence titled "child of the enemy," Barry addresses William Calley in lines that are broken apart, almost scarred, but resolute in their anger. The terrible legacy of Agent Orange and similar chemical weapons is the subject of "triage." And in one of the most powerful poems in the book, "'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land," Barry speaks to Phyllis Wheatley:

In your first winter you will be pronounced
Seven. Someone will pay to name you
For a ship. You will owe your life
To tight packing, the hull racing to port, human cargo

Impacted like teeth. Within months the floes
will dissipate, the thaw freeing
The harbor's dark trade. [. . .]

Barry returns to the body again and again, evoking blood, veins, and bones, and these provide a continuity, despite their inherent and emphatic fragility. In "napalm" she writes:

I have come to realize that the body is its own pyre, that degree
rises from within, the fatty acids a kind of kindling.
Like a scientist in a lab, this much I have established, blood jelled
like gasoline, the years spread before me like a map
pinned with targets, where I'm raging even now.

The body features in an unusual way in the four-part sequence on syphilis titled "plague," which effectively alternates some rather elegant language, often medical, with a cold, factual tone. Elsewhere, Barry's phrasing contains castoff references to physicality, as in the poem "vigil," where phrases such as "amniotic glare," "vinegar and gall" and "bracelets strung with baby teeth" provide a menacing cast to a fairy tale.

Barry strikes other tones and takes other subjects, too, ranging from intramural sports to higher mathematics. While these initially seem an odd juxtaposition to the powerfully dark poems that comprise the majority of the book, the consistency of her language—private, enigmatic, and urgent—carries the collection, making it a remarkable debut.