Review of Ginger Ko’s Motherlover

Motherlover is a book of poems that tell survival in cycles, in shames. These shames are difficult to attribute to any single source because they come from all angles, all generations, each a stripe of love and of body and of monotony and of otherwise. They hit, maybe most often, at the speaker’s own silly hopes for exit, for life without the hinderance of enforced self-doubt. How to be genuine when life has taught against trustworthiness? How to communicate over or outside of “all this insincerity in love stuff” (52)? What to do with a compulsorily acquired taste for harm? The answer, maybe, is to spurn by being so grossly alive: “testiness instead of suicide” (26).

When we talk of survival it is, chiefly, as triumph. Those narratives are supposed to soothe us. Analgesic to calm the worry that trauma might someday bend our backs and break our spirits. “Look, how resilient they are” is a way of saying “And so am I. And so I could be, too, if the time came.” It’s a way to forgive, in advance, the hurt we’ll impose on others. It’s the reason we like underdogs and out-of-the-hood stories. But Motherlover rejects the implication that the easy glint of triumph can overtake the enforced (and internalized) shames of family, gender, love, race. I found here relief from the expectation to roll over and inspire. Ko is remorseless in these still-stricken poems and a revelation in how vitality can look. Maybe continuance is the color of this book’s cover: red and black, anarchy, teeth and blood and numb depressive vacuity.

I do not mean that Motherlover deals solely with survival. But it uses survival as the framework with which to shoot our easy canned rhetoric back into our eyes, absurdly, always stopping short of mushy ubiquitous specificities: “[something something sentimental]” (64), it says, to fill the space where common core love occurs. Allowing such purities/guilelessness of feeling would be to allow diminishment. Not even the smallest triviality is simple under the weight of legacy, the guilt of next-generation living. “Prayer for What’s Close” opens with the line “Let me stay here in the west please God”(45) and closes on “This thing which is picking a spot on the wall for a picture as if it mattered dear God” (46), closing the loop of guilt and gratitude, seeing the absurdity in each small comfort while clinging to them for what they aren’t.

Coconut Books dissolved after its founder was accused of sexual assault and Ko, in an interview with Grace Shuyi Liew, supported his accusers. It’s a blow to the face that a book of this tenacity—a window busted into the fallouts of ordeal and the resolve and snark it takes to sludge through them—should be held under the auspices of such violence. But then how often does resistance come couched in oppression? What soils are left for raising verse and nuance? Blessedly, Bloof books has taken up printing this impactful volume, so we can have Ko's acumen without endorsing Coconut.