White, round stones were rolling along the waves. I could see far away. There was no sound. Salty water kept coming into my mouth.
—“The Watchtower,” Page 47
Our most poignant moments are portrayals of the self by the self. In Washing a Myna, Hwang InChan’s poetry explores these moments in crucial, transient detail, moments flittering by as a powerful flotation of dreams, the exacting language that forms placement and reference.
It is an exquisite collection with an exquisite process, a practical surrealism of South Korea that blends image and essence of image into a singular, wandering wonder. It is wonderful, full of wonder. It is exacting and enticing. These are short poems that need not know brevity, whose fullness is made so by the thickness of layers over depth.
It kept raining. I couldn’t feel the rain.
Souls with black hair reflected in the water were beckoning to me.
—“A Fluid Body,” Page 23
Washing a Myna is set to astound and fix gazes into drugged and drawled openness. This book asks the question: What if the funnel of experience was left to rush, to capture and instill, to fill the gaps, to allow the reader to slip into formation, position, a soft openness?
Hwang’s book follows a segmented form: four sections, each with an enduring number of poems. These sections might as well be long breaths, entire books encapsulating experience into tombs, relics. They are decorative and embodying of the extremities of our existence: what keeps us moving about across time, space, context, vision, and collapse from the next end to the next beginning.
Sparse and quiet life, does he have the same view from the second floor? The question is blocked by the second floor, the illumination in the living room is at its maximum.
—“A Resident,” Page 43
Hwang’s array of speakers and their positions in the world is both captivatingly focused and astonishingly varied, each poem moving from sequences across a space that explores distilled, singular images and provides a stark, responsive juxtaposition through environments, language, and action.
Stillness matches movement in an exquisite literary dance for readers. Where the poetry strays from the extreme symbolism and grotesque pronouncements of some of the poet’s South Korean contemporaries, it finds a profound home in its own original examinations.
It’s the morning when the endlessly stretching trees
and the shadows of the endlessly stretching trees collide with each other.
—“Section,” Page 51
There is a distinct blend of verse and prose. There is consistency in the crawl of experimentation in form. There are many subtle, stylistic elements working together, pouring themselves into a singular mixture that is this book, in all its liquidity. Translator Eun-Gwi Chung’s English renditions provide a subtlety that is far from muted, entirely accessible and plain language.
The plainness is surreal. The approachability is dreamlike. It is unpretentious worldbuilding, a practice of preserving and presenting the core. This approach transfixes. This approach is transformative. This approach offers a foundation appropriate for revisiting, and discoverable nooks and secrets. The translations seep into translations of experience. The poet’s experiences, relationships, and modalities of searching, learning, and being all seep through the lines as the book is read and reread.
At the beginning of Washing a Myna (Page 7), the prologue reads:
The tree stood still, yet its shadow was quivering.
In premonition and confusion, it was.
As succinct as a koan, as determinable as a dream, the book’s path is clear, and uproarious, and ready to be received by the nuanced explorations of its readers.
Greg Bem lived in Seattle for 13 years before moving to Spokane, where he has resided since 2023. He is a community college librarian and union organizer, small press publisher, poet and performer, and book reviewer, among other things. His reviews are linked on his website, and can be found published here in International Examiner as well as in Rain Taxi, North of Oxford, Exacting Clam, and Another Chicago Magazine.
