Brother Poem

“What does it mean to be/ exposed, to speak?” asks Harris (Rendang) in his enjoyable and unpredictable second collection. Across 14 poems and the longer title sequence, Harris’s speakers explore a world of communication at once direct and teasingly oblique. A poet of Chinese Indonesian and British descent, Harris uses the conceit of an address to a fictional brother to create a tapestry that weaves family, heritage, and memory, holding abstract imagery “in a shapeless/ flame” while observing “my collection of stones/ kept carefully wrapped/ in a Clarks shoebox.” The poems engage with slippery and organic rhetorical play. Yet, while his speakers seem bored by conventional forms of address, Harris can be magical when plainly reckoning with psychological geographies: “London he knew/ it was the other/ country in him/ he feared/ the oak tree’s unseen/ roots whose/ tendrils poked/ out mid-speech.” Harris’s questing consciousness expands against capitalist realities with insistent humanity: “If I hold to any belief/ then what/ I hold to like a favourite leaf/ is in there being /some continuity/ of being. So where are you.” Harris delivers an impactful examination of familial and societal relationships through these shape-shifting poems. (Mar.)