Togetherness
by Wo Chan
Nightboat Books, $17.95 paperback, 88 pages
At the red-hot, glittering core of Wo Chan’s explosive debut Togetherness is the intersection of the foul and the forlorn. Take, for instance, a spread of two prose poems, sutured together a third of the way through the collection: one begins “Yesterday, you took a shit so big at the office that it refused to flush,” while its companion reads, “The month you continued to ponder suicide you were sixteen and had stopped making eye contact with your family.” Chan, a genderqueer Brooklyn-based writer and drag artist, inundates nearly every page with this chaotic combination—Togetherness is not a study of restraint, but a joyous, unruly recreation of life’s big and small (melo)dramas.
Chan’s reverence for the grit and grime of everyday life is certainly attention grabbing. How could any reader resist diving headfirst into Chan’s feces-centered (or maybe even feces-celebratory) prose poem? Even for the more sensitive among us, Chan’s unflinching exploration of everything that makes us go Gross! demands attention—like driving by a nasty car crash on I-40. “When you yanked / the lever to draw another surge of water, the turd stayed—dense and staid, once, / twice, three, four, five times—unimpressed by the rush of plumbing.”
But what really propels (and elevates) Chan’s rowdy lyricism is a sincere attentiveness to here and now—Chan is quick to orient themselves towards a kairotic hyper-modernity (the collection opens with a poem titled “performing miss america at bushwig 2018, then chilling”), but Chan doesn’t humor the easy cynicism that so many lesser artists reach towards when rendering their vision of the contemporary. Rather, Chan presents a palimpsested time, punctuating the speaker’s embodied experience in the here and now with meditations on their familial lineage and vignettes of somatic memories.
Even the shit-filled prose poem is part of a larger series—there are 14 untitled prose poems scattered throughout Togetherness, depicting mundane dramas from the speaker’s life. From recollections of the speaker’s youth, watching Chopped at Gold’s Gym while they “burn calories on a conveyor belt powered by the other burning of prehistoric flora,” to descriptions of the speaker reading the racist Yelp reviews of their immigrant family’s restaurant, the totality of these moments feel so much more expansive than their individual parts.
Chan seems to have an affinity for constructing poetic series; along with the prose poems, Togetherness is comprised of a series of lyric poems entitled “@nature,” a collection of monologues from the speaker expressing the various discomforts of modernity (including the decline of the American empire and the volatility of shared memory in the digital era), as well as a series of documents relating to their family’s deportation battle. In turn, even the poems that are not connected to a recurring series feel cyclical, always sparking new but familiar conversations with the poetic series that surround them. Every poem informs the reading of the next, even as they thematically or temporally branch out in different directions.
Chan’s ever-shifting temporal scope results in a montage of connectedness. It’s a series of revelations: one moment always gestures towards another time, another place, and another embodiment. The revelations made by the speaker always feel miraculous and urgent (the poem “Such As” asserts, “My mother was a fever. My father was a restaurant,” before changing its mind, “My father was always the fever and always the restaurant”)—as if we, the readers, are activating our own lightbulb-moments at the exact pace as Chan.
These lightbulb moments, as the title of this ambitious collection suggests, reach towards togetherness—the constant and tender thrumb that emerges from the wounds of connecting with other human beings. “August Moments,” for instance, is an epistolary poem addressed to Chan’s mother. Chan moves associatively through their speaker’s memory-scape, culminating in three lines that are so sincere and intimate in their kindness that I was moved to tears in a uber-hip sushi shop: “you are so beautiful. mom, i would brush / and paint your face whenever you want me. just by the accident / of our blood, i feel lovely.”
Togetherness, then, is as softhearted as it is vulgar. It’s both loving and punishing. It’s dynamic, mercurial, and alive. It’s queer. It’s uncontrollable. Like a season of Chopped, it should be binged—it should be devoured.
