The Same-Different

Park's debut, winner of the 2014 Walt Whitman Award, astounds through the incredible sharpness with which she spots the knotted roots inside the English language, the way she dissects words to reveal how they contain and engender one another, and the way she breaks these words apart. "Just what they said about the river:/ rift and ever," she writes. "It may have been holy as scripture/ as scribes capture." While these sinuous linguistic turns feature throughout, it's fascinating to see Park train her sharp focus on the ways language also breaks apart interpersonal relations. "Shapes were aped," she writes, "now you're the very man/ to swap identities. To hell with costs/ and costumes." The book's long, hypnotic closing poem, "Fear," pits language dissection and personal dissection against one another in order to find out if the poet can survive a world in which these two elements must coexist. "Will you pull yourself together?" ask the poet's bones in one of Park's sadder, yet funnier, asides. "Will you pull me together?" she asks them back. For Park, a meticulous and alluring eviscerator of language, everything hinges on this question, and her refusal to fall back on hope is oddly triumphant in its bleakness: "I ask of you your silence// You:// and you,// You%E2%80%94" (Apr.)