THE 8TH HOUSE
by Feng Sun Chen
Black Ocean Press, 93 pages
reviewed by Johnny Payne
Aphorism is the thought slot of our time. Philosophy has turned cuneiform. The ambitious poem-cycles that might once have been written through urgent, incessant movement, seeking enjambment as a fugitive does a street corner, with muscular metaphors in hot pursuit, now favor the end-stop.
Feng Sun Chen, in The 8th House, practices this art of the succinct.
No organism is ashamed under the knife.
A woman’s body is an angel factory.
When I pick up a book and open it, it is dead.
Even in Chen’s first person stanzas, we get a colder intellect, rendering emotional candor into sedate masochism.
I like it when you look at me with disdain.
I say things that make you want to hurt me.
This is the real thing, severe as winter
part icicle that cannot be smashed
part that parts leaves nothing to fill, only futility fills.
But although nothing free-floats, it’s hard to point to a firm scheme. The principle of recursive imagery, twining time and again around the broken spine, holds this book together more than any set of explicit ideas. Most of all, there is the image of water. “The dead lover seeks wetness;” “Very moist and quiet and dripping;” Manatees mistaken for mermaids, steaming shame, magma, jelly, tar, spinal lubricant, mucus, foam, dark lymph, viscosity of wood, and of course the sea. Feng Su Chen signifies in effluent images, in a long concatenation that expresses itself as an extended thought wave. To this extent, she revives the spirit of the poem-cycle, and it is chiefly in this way that she resembles those expansive bards seeking to create the über poem.