Engine Empire

Starred review from February 20, 2012
Hong’s third book renders a triptych of frontiers—the Old West, the new East, and the digital world—where artistic acts are often tantamount to subversion. “Ballad of Our Jim,” a sequence of cowboy ballads within ballads, follows a crew of outlaws and their kidnapped boy, a rebellious bard they christened “Jim,” through an unsettled age when “the whole country is in a duel and we want no part of it.” “Shangdu, My Artful Boomtown!” a mix of epistolary, prose, lyric, and persona poems, grapples with vocation and origin in a globalizing era, addressing directly and indirectly Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Berryman. Especially striking is “Adventures in Shangdu,” a sequence of prose poems depicting a dystopia whose citizens include a factory worker reproducing Rembrandts and a prawn vendor executed for “tilt his surveillance camera so it caught nothing but the sun.” Sharp and lyrical poems in “The World Cloud” take on digital realms, where “the search engine is inside us,/ the world is our display.” This book is full of luminous surprises.

April 1, 2012

Hong's poetry engine generates imagined worlds that weirdly parallel the ones we know. The book (her third, after Dance Dance Revolution) has three parts, each set in a different milieu: a rollicking Wild West that mildly resembles California a la Michael Ondaatje's Billy the Kid; Shangdu, a prototype boomtown; and a cloud-based future in which one can recall "the antique ringtones of singing/ wrens, babbling babies, and ballad medleys...." If Shangdu recalls Coleridge's Xanadu or lime tree bower ("Shangdu, my artful boomtown!" is the section's title), it is also the scene of rampant, dehumanizing development, where Highrise Apartment 88 is erected so hurriedly that one whole wall is omitted. Throughout, even the words sound invented: telenovela, thip, harmine--but they're not. But Webster's won't get you too far in these regions, where people live to be 150 and cowboys scat sing, "I'm a natty cross-dressing/ wrestler in possum/ chaps, my boots can smash/ any clapboard slat...." The middle and final sections of this triptych are stronger than the first, where sound gets the better of sense, but much of this book is deliciously inventive. VERDICT A smart, disorienting look at our present-future set out in a rich hybrid language.--Ellen Kaufman, New York

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