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Why is the Edge Always Windy?
Mong-Lan
Tupelo Press, 2005
ISBN: 1932195289
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Mong-Lan, a writer,
visual artist and dancer, came to the United States as a child with
her family the day before the fall of Saigon in 1975. Her second
book of poems, Why Is The Edge Always Windy?, requires that
we extend ourselves and dive beneath the surface of reality. It is
a stunning book of revelations, nightmares, and love poems,
cross-cultural and historically compelling. Grounded in the rhythms
of the heart and the world, the poems are lyrically intense with an
edgy intelligence. The poet entices you to enter her world, asking
questions, drawing you into her visions of the past, present and
future.
In Why Is The Edge
Always Windy?, the poet finds herself “being” in many cities,
whether Saigon, Hanoi, San Francisco, New York City, Paris,
Lausanne, Bangkok or Phnom Penh. Rhythms of the city and
countryside, rhythms of disaster, rhythms of the earth, rhythms of
desire are manifest in these poems. Imagistic, surreal and
penetrating, her writing cuts to the quick, “nothing less but the
world at stake.” Whether writing of Vietnam or 9/11, Mong-Lan’s
language is inventive and muscular, at times philosophical and
elegiac. In these lyrics a concern for the fate of humanity and the
world is posited. The book
ends with a play on words, the lover visiting the beloved, from
“Trail”, “patterned below the scandent mountains /
they've had a million
years to practice their lines.”
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