Dunk

Staples Teresa Sparks DyNK Robbie Q. Telfer Red Juice is alive with the music of echoes that double and halve at once— meaning, in more than one direction. This is a poetry of the everyday that playfully and mournfully reminds us that we live in a field ofVenn diagrams where home, war, food, culture, cooking, birthing, and art all overlap. There is no naïveté, here, about the stability of those categories or of the physical territories they imply. Instead, thesis is returned to its place as the downbeat of a song, and Nguyen dances among these overlapping worlds. Human existence is, in bodily terms, comprised of cycles. The story of Persephone and her pomegranate, round like a heart and red like blood, was one explanation for the division ofthe (agri)cultural year into seasons— for the change from static to cyclical time. It is also the story ofajourney to the underworld, a place that means differently, and the story suggests that what you ingest has implications for humanity as a whole. In other words, buy from local farmers, be sustained by the local, "food / straight from growers no stickers / on my apples." A primary tension of our existence is this paradox: while we must take in material from outside ofourselves to sustain us, these materials can also poison. Nguyen's solution seems to be to refuse to deny your particular, momentary and changing positionality. Humanity is chthonic: "The Earth is in me I'm old / and clay nameless / 'grass' with tiny yellow flowers... The Earth is capable and heals you." However rooted we may be in the Earth, then, Nguyen also recognizes the significance of internal flows, of blood, and little wonder: in the many worlds she negotiates—dream, waking, capitalist, cooperative, public and private—the unequal power distribution in evidence between such arbitrary binaries permits the powerful world to demand blood from the powerless. Blood is the price, the sacrifice—the source of strength and story. A woman's monthly blood tells a story in clots and flows, and is equally capable ofrelating both ? conceived' and ? did not.' Bodies in RedJuice are not passive; they are implicated in the political and cervical reality of the everyday, and literally work to create the new: "By March I'll have gained 2 pounds / in uterine muscle." Bridget, the divine feminine who has three aspects in one body, who watches over poetry, smithcraft, childbirth, and the healing arts, making and making well, is the guardian spirit of Red Juice. She was reconfigured by the Catholics as a l saint when the converted wouldn't stop worshipping her. As a goddess, if not as a saint, she is another multiplicitous feminine entity who, as Clotho, spins; as Lachesis, measures; and as Átropos, cuts the threads of life. And what is a text if not something woven? I spun the baby out of you and "energy buttons" me I am she who unknots the cord and lashes us boatless. Like Penelope, Nguyen weaves and unweaves, changes without progressing, traces and retraces minute spatial territory, and we begin to suspect that what is important is not the territory, but the tracing. In Red Juice, women are bridges. We create in our bodies one child from two parents, and in weaving take a weak thread and make it strong. Though Red Juice is in many ways a book about women, to speak ofNguyen as a poet ofthe feminine is to oversimplify. It is more accurate to say that making here, and thus poetry, is the province of both sexes, but that Nguyen writes as a woman and as a subject, where "woman" becomes the place where she is standing: If I can't have another baby I'll bake midnight cookies a little nut cookie Forming something out of nothing or more precisely a more complex something from a simpler something. Nguyen also hints that poetry is as utile as gardening, cooking, or weaving. Poetry has a place in everyday life—can be about everyday life on one level—but it is also a complicated flower, a paper bird, a life and its thoughts, unfolding. She reminds us that emotions also are culture; they are...