Joan Kwon Glass
Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms
Perugia Press
Reviewer: Elisabeth Adwin Edwards
In her powerful second full-length collection, poet Joan Kwon Glass never shies away from difficult questions.
“The first Koreans were part god, part beast,” begins the final stanza of the opening poem, “Bloodline.” The poet continues, “Every morning I look in the mirror and ask: Which will I be today?” We, as readers, want to know, so we follow Glass through this deftly braided narrative in which she confronts the themes of colonization and trauma, abandonment, religious fundamentalism, addiction and disordered eating, and profound grief over the loss of her sister and nephew, both of whom died by suicide. These poems offer no easy answers; they ache with a “hunger that wants to be fed” and a “hunger that burns.”
The poet chooses not to divide Daughter into sections; instead the book unfolds in mostly chronological order, in the way a personal history is woven from image and memory, the past always infusing the present, and vice versa. Many of the poems in the beginning of the book are set in Korea, where Glass, who is half Korean, spent a large portion of her childhood with her maternal grandmother, who survived the Japanese annexation of her country.
“Black Cows” opens on Jeju Island during the occupation, when the Japanese, admiring “the black cattle / that had grazed Jeju’s fields long before / the Joseon Dynasty …” declare them Japanese and “the brown cows Korean.” The poem then moves to Daegu, her grandparents’ hometown; the year is 1988, the speaker a young girl:
I am eleven years old.
I ask my grandmother to tell me
what our Japanese surname was.
It is the only time in my life
that she slaps me.
Glass’s deep love and admiration for her grandmother—a woman who had learned “she could endure / shame if it meant that when it passed, / she was still standing”—are clearly evident. In “Inheritance,” the poet describes the harrowing experience of her grandparents escaping Daegu in 1950, their three children in tow. When their train makes a scheduled stop, her mother, then five, wanders off, and is almost left behind. A kind passenger pulls her up to safety in the nick of time. Glass tells us:
… when home cannot be / one place or another / cannot be mother or child / we become the levitation itself / wingspan of glass / the burning always somewhere behind us …
We are then transported to America, where the poet is now an adolescent trapped between her mother’s religious austerity and her father’s remoteness and disapproval. Here she encounters racism in school: “… a boy named Thomas whispered Joanie Loves Chachi and pulled his eyes back at me … My name was American, but not American enough” and, more horrifyingly, within her own family. In “Christmas, 1983,” she discovers her father’s father (her “white grandfather”) watching television “in the dark with a bottle of gin”:
and in a sudden storm of liquor soured-breath, he muttered,
Get outta here you fuckin’ gook.”
I could hear a rerun of Wheel of Fortune on the TV. The wheel’s spokes
churned and spit. The audience’s applause went on forever.
The young poet discovers little comfort in the religious dogma to which her mother clings with such fervor, only fear and uncertainty: “Every night my mother covered me in prayer, / like a blanket never quite long or warm enough.” She begins to wrestle with her faith, and something much darker: “In second grade I stopped / eating, my stomach / a catalyst for the apocalypse.” She is also witness to the “long silences” within her parents’ marriage. In “Blind Fish,” the poet is lake fishing with her father in Northern Michigan. Glass writes movingly of what is to come:
In a year, he will leave us. Signs
are everywhere—minnows darting blindly,
bait dangling on the line, the sun
radiant as pain. Me squinting up at him.
How the world can look so bright
just before it catches fire.
Suddenly living in a house in which “every sound echoes,” she copes by stealing miniature glass animals from the mall, becoming “queen of small things,” and attempting to disappear herself. But “Even after my mother stopped / setting a place for my father / at the table,” the speaker cannot sate her longing:
… his absence held me up
like a throne.
Jesus was coming
or not. My mother saw me
or not. What mattered was my body
perched on the hill behind our house,
the emptying field.
What mattered was that beneath
every surface, unseen creatures
burrowed in the darkness,
the familiar hum of my hunger.
The poet’s story is so charged by absence—her grandmother’s loss of her country, her father’s abandonment, her emotional estrangement from her mother, the deaths of her beloved nephew and sister, her addiction, and fears as a parent—it is hard to fathom how she could survive it. Yet Glass endures and is ferocious in her self-examination: “ I have failed so often / in this life.” A lesser poet might descend into self-pity; Glass never does.
The “Hungry Ghost” poems that haunt this beautiful collection are some of its most potent. Glass was inspired by the agwi of Korean folklore—ghosts, who in their former lives, committed crimes motivated by greed and avarice, and therefore are condemned to wander among humans, unable to consume food which, when it touches their mouths, bursts into flames. Many of these visceral, short-lined poems deal with Glass’s eating disorder, and her sister’s suicide. “Harmful Conduct Hungry Ghost” left me shattered:
Before I was a ghost, I shared my life
with ghosts. When her son died, my sister
refused to leave his body.
The funeral director let her sleep
on a couch next to his casket
in the viewing room.
Maybe she was already a ghost,
and we all knew it.
What does it say about me
that I left them both
there that night, in the dark,
with only the undertaker eating
a sandwich in the next room?
Glass’s poems fear nothing and spare no one, least of all, the poet herself, and therein lies their power. These brave poems illuminate “How sometimes we can’t distinguish between what saves us and / what destroys us,” and how the choices we make define who we are.
