Goddess of Democracy: An Occupy Lyric

“Imagine an impossible love, like an impossible grammar,” demands Leung in his debut, winner of the 2016 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize, as he integrates essay, translation, text erasure, and lyric to examine themes of race, privilege, and national identity. Born in China and raised in the U.S., Leung uses the deeply symbolic statue known as the Goddess of Democracy as the focal point for thoughts on such issues as the misinterpretation or misrepresentation of a social movement and what it means to take a political stand. The original statue, built and razed during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, has become a potent symbol of free speech and democracy: “born in papier-mâché, a face plastered white... facing the portrait of the Chairman of Mao.” A replica was erected in Hong Kong during 2014’s student-led occupation movement, which occurred in response to electoral reforms by the Chinese Communist Party and which Leung witnessed. What makes this collection magnetic is the measured way that Leung unpacks his own roles—witness, outsider, American, and translator—in the Hong Kong protests. “I can’t declare myself ‘for’ or ‘against,’ ” Leung writes. “These two words are as useless as ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the face of understanding, in the face of all our failures to understand each other.” (Oct.)