SONGS SHARP AND TENDER

In Park’s book of poems, a speaker reflects on identity while searching for collective human experiences.

Divided into four parts, this collection touches on themes of family and travel early on. In Parts I and II, readers meet the speaker’s immediate family members; she’s married to a man with whom she has two adult daughters, and they have at least one grandson. The poems here don’t enforce a romanticized version of family life, but effectively give insight into its discomforts; often, the speaker is the least relatable character, as in the prose poem “Exhale the Alps”: While on a hike, the speaker silently criticizes her daughter and son-in-law’s parenting and looks at nature to distract herself; “I / trust in sunscreen,” the speaker shares, “newbie parents on first high-trek with babe / slather on none.” In half a stanza in the piece “Ax in Glacial Ice,” the speaker, who’s white, regards her daughters’ biracial identities—her husband is Korean American—and worries, “what assaults might it bring you?” In “Monticello Marvels,” Park offers a troubling narrative that asks the reader to picture Thomas Jefferson raping Sally Hemings, a teenage Black girl whom he enslaved; however, the poem handles this horrific story recklessly, almost passively, in its attempts to empower the victim: “You’ve become / an expert at persuasion of your virtue— / you use him for your purpose.” In several poems, such as “Forgetting in Kauai,” Park uses the double colon, a poetic device that’s a step beyond the pause or list that a comma provides; it also hints that conjoining words or phrases are connected. Here, it adds some movement to the pieces, but it often makes the choppy phrases’ relationships unclear.

An uneven collection that sometimes grapples with disturbing tropes.