cover image STRUCTURES OF FEELING

STRUCTURES OF FEELING

Hung Q. Tu, . . Krupskaya, $11 (107pp) ISBN 978-1-928650-19-5

Following up on Verisimilitude (2000), Tu's eight formally spare and elegant assays hold globalism and first-world mindsets in a sort of suspended animation, like a punk-rock diorama, or a meditative counter-spectacle to a 24-hour cable news channel: "Teriyaki plains indians/ Napoleon rose to the rank of syndrome/ salary hats/ well-armed drunks wear out the welcome wagon/ ski masks as hood ornament// pinch me I'm in America," writes Tu in the opener, "Tophatters." The air of the interior exile is apparent in the ironic eye cast on all social narratives, and in a dark wit that doesn't seem to believe that spontaneous creativity, even if ebullient, can really matter. An intentional aridness intensifies this sense of remove, and allows a kind of rigorous stock-taking and role-shifting. The sequence "[untitled]" is perhaps the loosest, most frenetic and daunting piece. Seemingly random at first, rushing from word to word without breaking to assess the phrase, a careful reading reveals Tu's characteristic acidity ("evidence/ in stitches") and many mischievous spanners thrown into works of false consciousness: "psyched 'nice boss' medicinal/ I saw my tenth-grade heart replaced by/ a conch on CBS aka him vinegar joe/ akimbo bareheaded and bespectacled/ etc. ended in the fifties." Such sequences, and there are many here, take readers on a lively, deftly accounted gallery tour that puts together some hardcore, if unsettled and bleak, structures for thinking and feeling. (Oct.)