By Laura Jane Lee

Exposure
Eric Yip
Ignitionpress (2024) / 23 pages / SGD 10.30 (GBP 6)

A Study in Our Selves
Max Pasakorn
Neon Hemlock (2023) / 55 pages / SGD 23.50

I love epigraphs. When reading a collection, the epigraph is the first thing I turn to after the title. I believe it says far more about the soul of the work – its imaginative impulse – than the synopsis and the blurb, if the blurb even says anything about its soul. Often, I do not read the synopsis or the blurb until after I've finished the collection. The epigraph, if the writer has chosen to include one, is likely the most truthful indicator of what they have to say.

Eric Yip's debut pamphlet Exposure (Ignitionpress, 2024) has been much anticipated since his 2021 National Poetry Competition win at just 19 – a feat which made him the youngest-ever winner of the annual international poetry prize run by the UK-based Poetry Society. The slim volume presents 20 poems, an exploration of queerness, familial relationships and postcolonial Hong Kong, mostly framed by the visual medium (photographic or cinematic – the titular allusion), or else foregrounding some aspect of vision and the notion of gaze. Yip opens the pamphlet with an epigraph from Jenny Xie's 'Long Nights', a poem from her collection Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018):

Nothing is as far as here.

Xie's Eye Level is, in her own words, an exercise in "thinking through the entanglements of gazes and visual encounters with power, selfhood, and presence" and "in many ways thinking about the entanglement of the seer and the seen". It is based on this intertextuality, having been firmly established at the outset, that Yip intends for us to understand the works' perceptual resonances. In a blog post on epigraphs, Austin Jantzi opines that "Epigraphs are a direct statement of intent. They're a message to me to help me stay on the interpretive track they intend." I am inclined to agree. Yip's epigraph to Exposure, then, is at once instructional and confessional – instructional as interpretive suggestion, and confessional in that the poet shows his hand. The subtext to these poems is punctuated by loneliness and distance: "Nothing is as far as here."

Exposure opens with the well-chosen 'Ardently Love', taking its title from the eponymous Cantopop song《酷愛》by Hins Cheung. 'Ardently Love' has its own epigraph, which reads:

爱滋佬
lit. "AIDS guy"
(neologism, colloquial, derogatory) a gay man

The instructions here are clear, interpreting even the title – 酷愛, aside from meaning an "extreme, ardent fondness or love", is the contraction of 酷兒 (queer) and 愛 (love). This heavy framing parallels the context required to understand the picture alluded to in the poem, David Wojnarowicz's 'Untitled (Buffaloes)', a "haunting meditation (and) deeply personal commentary on life during the AIDS crisis". 'Ardently Love', then, is a well-chosen opening poem as a thematic frame, but also because it is Yip at his best – assuming a quiet, assured posture, and a clear, confident poetic voice. Consider the acuity of the final line:

The story needs the cliff as much as it needs the buffaloes.

Surely this is a voice mature beyond its years. It is unsurprising, then, that Yip won the National Poetry Competition at 19 with 'Fricatives'. It is after much thought and deliberation – repeatedly turning the poem over and over – that I might venture to call 'Fricatives' an almost 'perfect' poem. Helen Vendler, in Coming of Age as a Poet (Harvard University Press, 2003), helpfully suggests the requirements that qualify the perfection of, among others, John Keats's 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' and T.S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. Now, without turning this into an exercise in box-checking, I would posit that 'Fricatives' does indeed fulfil most of Vendler's requirements. It exhibits a "governing stylistic decorum", which while not perfectly consistent, serves the poem competently; though the exceptional achievement of the poem lies in the acute correspondence between the "salient elements of the outer sense-world" (e.g. Mrs Lee, the inmates from Alcatraz, the stall of the dingy Cantonese restaurant) and the poet's "idiosyncratic imagination".

We see the success of 'Fricatives' replicated at times throughout Exposure, in some measure; for example in 'Broadway Cinematheque', 'Star Ferry Pier' and '裂 / Tear', a poem in which the persona's father "(breaks) / so completely, as if a vast crevasse / had unzipped his life" – calling to mind Nicholas Wong's Lambda-winning collection, Crevasse (Kaya Press, 2015). Where Exposure feels somewhat wanting is perhaps in the poems that require too much contextual knowledge to comprehend in full. For example, "[First they began cutting the world]", in which the reviewer, Helena Nelson, seems to read the theme of queerness, but has missed the place-based references to conformity completely. This is an understandable stylistic flaw – given that it is likely more advisable nowadays to be overly covert and oblique. Though addressing a different context, Yip says it well himself in 'Star Ferry Pier': "There is somewhere I need to go and I cannot get there with language."

Alongside Exposure, I had the pleasure of reading Max Pasakorn's creative non-fiction chapbook (to use the American term), A Study in Our Selves (Neon Hemlock, 2023). Though published as creative non-fiction, A Study in Our Selves formally teeters on the line of the lyric essay, verging on prose poetry. As conveyed anecdotally at an event, it would seem that Pasakorn themself initially intended for the chapbook to be a work of poetry, though they accidentally submitted it for the 2022 Outwrite Chapbook Competition under the creative non-fiction category. In any case, A Study in Our Selves won the competition, and such genre-bending (genre-blending?) manifestly enriches the work rather than detracts from it.

A consequence of A Study in Our Selves being published as a work of creative non-fiction is that the pieces read unmistakably as confessional. Pasakorn's chosen epigraph is from Carmen Maria Machado's memoir, In the Dream House (Graywolf Press, 2019):

The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection.

In just one line, Pasakorn has framed the work as a memoir, and grasped the reader's attention: Who is this memoir about? What is being resurrected? The title, A Study in Our Selves, ostensibly answers the reader's first question, while the second is incredibly effective as a narrative hook. But their choice of epigraph is more adroit than that – Machado's memoir, described by The Guardian as "slightly mind-bending", is an experimental, form-shattering memoir borrowing from various genres and tropes (e.g. self-help, romance novel, Choose Your Own Adventure), through which she filters her memory. Not only is this crucial in understanding what Pasakorn is trying to achieve with their work, it also serves as a stylistic elucidation of their provocative, eccentric voice – one which centres the body and embodies the writing, calling to mind the work of poet Chen Chen.

Though a happy accident, there may indeed be good reason for A Study in Our Selves to have been published as creative non-fiction. The pieces that read more as short lyric essays (e.g. 'ลาก (laak) // to drag (v.)' and 'ภาสกร // Pasakorn') – in that they convey a more evident sense of narrative – seem to be Pasakorn's particular strength. Among these, 'รัก (rak) // to love (v.)' stands out as especially strong, with its clear, considered turns of phrase:

My father was on the phone, asking me why I would want to live like a dog in Singapore when I could return to my motherland and live like royalty. He could take care of me, he said. I think my instincts kicked in during that conversation.

The piece ends on a confessional note, with exceptional vulnerability – arguably an accurate rendering of Pasakorn's strongest work. The pieces which read more as prose poems tend, then, to pale in comparison. Despite being the titular poem(s), the sequence on (the) self fails to achieve the same impact and resolve as the pieces with a more narrative bent. Then there is also the issue of titling. The pieces are – save for the self sequence – consistently titled in the style of "variants on". Titles such as '秘密 (me me) // secrets (n.)' and '市 (shi) // city (n.) a homonym of 是 (shi) // yes (adv.)' often tend to be criticised for claiming some sort of "blunt-force ethnic credibility". It is important to recognise the difference in context here – Pasakorn is not writing as a member of the Singaporean/Thai-Chinese diaspora in the US, but is in fact writing as a Singaporean-Thai-Chinese from Singapore, seeking publication in the US. This is arguably an even more difficult position to be in, given the extra consideration that needs to be given to matters of audiences, marketing and distribution logistics. This is also not a predicament unique to Pasakorn – just look at Yip's '裂 / Tear' and other poems not included in Exposure. I will be first to admit that I too have fallen into this trap – I have an entire pamphlet of unfortunately-titled juvenilia co-opting this very trope, and instances of similar tendencies even in my more recent pamphlet. This is undoubtedly a corollary of writing for publication in anglophone centres of literary production – just a small part of the baggage that comes with being positioned or marketed as a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of colour) writer for the US market or BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) writer for the UK market. But as I have come to realise, the onus is on us to resist this pigeonholing, these expectations of niche-branding – by interrogating our own performativity and asking who we are performing our culture for.

Yip's Exposure and Pasakorn's A Study in Our Selves, though vastly different stylistically, are resonant in their thematic exploration of familial relationships, queerness and displacement. Where Yip's Exposure is evidently inflected by the contemporary British tradition, and somewhat by the trends set by British Asian poets such as Sarah Howe and Kit Fan; Pasakorn writes more freely, accounting for the bold work in A Study in Our Selves that seems to make all categorisation strange. And ultimately, both pamphlets/chapbooks are a masterclass in the power of an excellent epigraph: instructional, confessional, frame, hook and manifesto. So the next time you read a collection, remember the epigraph – the soul of the work is where it truly starts.

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