Into the Cyclorama by Annie Kim (review)

It’s often said that wonderful and terrible events shape those who experience them, and in Into the Cyclorama, Annie Kim explores what shapes exactly they create. This book, winner of the 2015 Michael Waters Poetry Prize, brings together twenty-eight poems that don’t simply play with form, but manipulate lyrical construction, strengthening the theme of a given piece, whether examining the lonely displacement of moving from house to house, or the desolation of lost faith after a sudden death. Structure becomes content highlighting the ways one is altered, often permanently, by life’s events, even when they seem innocuous.

The book begins with an epigraph from Hesiod’s The Shield of Herakles, which describes the shield, with a Gorgon’s head surrounded by silver and gold, terror and beauty in harmony. This serves as a powerful precursor to the poems, offering a mixed image of something deadly designed to lure people toward danger, as well as a bad situation surrounded by good tidings and silver linings. “Thin Gold String,” the first poem, explores this well, describing escalating tribulations like a button falling off a beloved antique coat, soon reaching “Each heartbreak swooping in for its / own black bit of universe.” Soon, it culminates in a need to “hold it all before your eyes, grab / both ends of this thin gold string.” This poem is a series of couplets, beginning and ending with a single line, physically emulating this idea, showing how easy it can be to hold on while the words emphasize the need to let go.

“Portrait with a Blurred Tattoo” shows Kim’s use of structure again in this piece about a woman gradually losing the ability to care for herself as she ages, suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s. It begins with a description of the portrait sitting by herbed, describing the woman and son as they were when younger. The third line is set off, indented farther than the others, saying they were “still perfect, unwrinkled,” while describing the son two stanzas later as “embarrassed by the moment.” This poem is full of breaks to show a change of scene, and the next brings an image of the mother, wearing a bib to keep drool off her clothing, her body withered and weak, when the son looks away, “his mouth a fist.” Two breaks later, the piece ends with a moment of clarity for the old woman, where she “seemed to want to lose” as she laughs and forfeits a card game.

Form can also be seen stretching across multiple pages. “The Bronze Helmet (A Retrospective)” is a poem in ten parts, stretching across eleven pages. A quote from Joseph Brodsky’s “Homage to Marcus Aurelius” precedes them, reading, “…and the bronze denies you any entry, including interpretation of touch.” These poems follow the saga of marathon runner Sohn Kee-chung, the first Korean man to win a gold medal at the Olympics. In response, “the Greek newspaper Vradiny donated” a bronze helmet, excavated from Olympia in 1875, to the runner, but it didn’t reach him until the 1988 games in Seoul, when he was seventy-four. Not all of the parts are overtly about him—section two, “Looking at a Collage by Raphael Danke” is about an unnamed narrator examining a work of art, describing the artist’s technique by saying, “The cut itself is a brutal, almost / physical attack on the paper.” These seemingly unrelated sections are perhaps best tied together in section eight, “Fragment of a Play,” where a chorus sings: “Do not tell us of defeat! / We have eaten nothing else / night and day these thirty years.”

While a number of poems deal with history, “Hemispheres” combines historical reference and modern science. It begins with a personal sentiment, “At the piano, my adolescent sister, / Beethoven’s Pathetique swelling like / a petticoat lost at sea.” This quickly changes to grander designs, commenting that “time…could be particle and wave.” A few lines of this poem are set aside, aligned to the right side of the page...