Review by Kelly R. Samuels
Some of us collect stones; we line window ledges or fill bowls with them. We often think of them as static, unless moved by another—water, a person, an animal, a machine—or altered in color when wet or shape when worn down. In Willie Lin’s debut poetry collection, Conversation Among Stones, the speaker struggles with whether to remain static and mum like a stone and not give in to recollection: “I barely wanted to go on / Though I tried, as if deciding between” (69).
Sleep is equated with the stone. It can be seen as offering escape and safety, as well as a refusal to remember. In the opening poem, “To You and For You,” Lin writes, “I wanted sleep / until the danger passed” (11). What memories there are—personal, familial—are too painful to recollect. Better to close the eyes, and in doing so, forget for a time, like the lotus eaters referenced later in the collection. For when waking, Lin’s speaker is “beholden” (14); the memories are burdensome, as is the continual winter and its snow resembling ash. There are references to a cellar, being deserted in “what passed / for a park” (21), two graves, tanks, and a “man who marched and starved” (35). Among all this is the mother, thin and pregnant, lost by the speaker “By the water” (22).
To be a stone, then, is to not look, or not look fully at the past, nor speak of it. Lin writes:
Name a stone
after me, I’d thought, I
would be a stone
in that field…. (63)
Along with the pain of these memories is sometimes the inability to recall, which can carry its own grief. Lin adeptly uses the incomplete line to suggest either a failure to remember, or, again, a refusal. In both “Apologia (Book IX)” and “Little Fugues” she sometimes ends lines without punctuation or with a colon and nothing following. Other very brief poems, like “Dear,” with its two lines, and the second of the “Memory” poems with its three lines, read like fragments, while also giving the reader a space to breathe, serving almost as section breaks would.
Shifting use of pronouns—I, you, she, we, her—also prompt the reader to question whose memory it is, in addition to illustrating that the suffering is not felt solely by one person. This is seen most clearly in the three poems entitled “Teleology.” In the first poem, the speaker refers to herself in the first person. In the second poem, a third-person speaker addresses a “her” and a “she.” In the third poem, second-person is utilized. “The Clearing” also addresses a “you”; this you could be the mother, the brothers, or the speaker displacing the memory in an effort to protect themselves. The speaker of many of the poems could also differ, hence the collection’s title.
Lin’s use of imagery from the natural world often aligns with the pain of recollection. Bees are trapped in amber, birds fall from the sky, leaves are brown and dry, flowers, like morning glories, bloom only briefly. A branch’s shadow is mistaken “for a bruise” (45) or the branch itself is felled. It is so often winter. This gives the collection a cohesive feel, that the poems are effectively in conversation with one another.
The sea, constant, does have its tides that offer restoration, and light, referenced multiple times, carries positive connotations. Midway through the collection winter begins to withdraw. These glimpses suggest that Lin’s speaker is working toward reconciliation, maybe even transformation, as the collection moves forward. Perhaps sleeping like a stone is not for the best and the memories must be shared:
It is time
to see in full what you’ve understood only in profile,
turned slightly away, as if
toward a source of light, some idea of god: (57)
She will make the best of it, “make something of suffering / the way I can make something of elbows” (73).
This is a collection for anyone who has wanted to look away, but also wanted to understand and carry on, using words as the foundation.
Conversation among Stones by Willie Lin
BOA Editions. November, 2023. $17. Paper.
ISBN: 9781960145048
Kelly R. Samuels is the author of two poetry collections: Oblivescence (Red Sweater Press) and All the Time in the World (Kelsay Books) and four chapbooks: Talking to Alice (Whittle Mirco-Press); To Marie Antoinette, from (Dancing Girl); Words Some of Us Rarely Use (Unsolicited); and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks (Finishing Line). A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her work can be found in The Massachusetts Review, RHINO, and Sixth Finch. Find her here: www.krsamuels.com