Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s fifth poetry collection, Aerial Concave without Cloud, is washed in the pale blue light of apocalyptic reckoning. Prophetic and aphotic, this book begins at the microscopic level—photons, nanoseconds, subatomic forces—and ends at the macroscopic scale—fugitive motion, transnational belonging, the poem as a social terrain, ancestral grief, and the subterranean afterlives of the Korean War. The poems refract the sun’s lambent rays to “orient the field of my gaze / all-consumed by blind ambient glare.” With a pace that mirrors the phases of sal’puri, a Korean dance that purifies the shaman following an exorcism, this collection approaches language with methodical patience and as a redemptive instrument. These ablutions continue until we are left with nothing but corpuscles of light once more, primed for reassemblage into new solar radiations.
In an interview for Entropy magazine, Lee said, “To write and read a poem is to potentially shake loose the drapes over the machinery, to assist in sensitizing new reading and mindfulness habits that can allow us to see otherwise or through. . . . Those who take on poetry as their primary means for engaging the world are choosing to take on this central conundrum of sign, affect, and perception that shapes the consensual reality we inhabit.” In deconstructing language to the particle level, these poems ask us to question the substructures that comprise us, where meaning is derived as an interrelationship between unstable signs, “deciphering how the action between bodies and light is mutual.” She transcribes the reverberations of the Korean War that never formally concluded in a peace treaty, this light that still burns, detectable and diffuse. In the counterglow, we notice the indistinct figures of others alongside us seeking impossible reconciliations, standing in a field “gleam[ing] with a crystalline equanimity.” This collection teaches us to find serenity in their heat, for “is not fire a body heated so hot as to emit copiously?”
Much of the first half of this collection is comprised of oneiric fragments that describe shards of light falling on surfaces, the lines void of metric patterning. Lee’s deliberate, calculated pace works to dilate and constrict lyric time, locating itself with such granularity in the present tense that the present becomes hyperreal. Her poems record each photon of light that is transmitted, mediated, reflected, displaying a painstaking awareness that elides experience itself. Language saturates the body as a perceptual tool, dissecting stimuli until their discrete components are visible. Lee writes, “part of the ensuing discourse about light / was written at my desire / to comprehend the phenomenon / through the lens of my breathing body.” We are “in the blood’s awareness,” perceiving without assimilating, each image cleansed by the following. Aerial Concave without Cloud delivers to us the totalizing realization that all visual information is the consequence of light’s contact with a surface. This witnessing is reciprocal, a consummation of absorption and transmission. “What am I broadcasting at every quivering instant?” a poem asks us. “What information is being so blindly delivered into me?”
Even definitions are too static. To name something is to force it into the violence of an ideal. In a phenomenological meditation on a tree, Lee asks, “can one ever / a single, an only, a one / a tree.” Although the fragmented form magnifies stimuli to a point of isolation, the poem insists that “we must not deduce / the truth of light / consider the entire process in / a unified manner from the start.” Here is a body without an I, dislocated from history. Instead, it simply absorbs and interpolates, diffusing light, reminding us of the infinity contained between integers. By defamiliarizing somatic experience, Lee asks us to experience the world as if for the first time, to make the proprioceptive into something no longer inert: “I want to understand what opens up in this dis-attended collection at the periphery of perception, at the seeming limit of its transformation.” This level of awareness of cognition isolates experience and approaches it with total curiosity, detaching it from judgment and the past.
The second half of the book breaks into a section titled “Relinquish / the Sky,” where Lee reflects on the scientific method of her poetics. She writes of her traversals through the Arctic Circle in Tromsø, the west fjords of Norway, and the grasslands in Wyoming, recording the light from streetlamps and the aurora borealis. Wherever she went, she said that she had come to study the muted winter light. “I began my inquiry into light, simply: can I decipher a similar capacity to translate and speak the light with my living human body? / And by doing so, can I relinquish the intensities of an inherited orphan grief?” Through this form of luminous witnessing, loss is transformed into a form of inquisition, disidentified instead of sublimated. She attempts to reconcile with this “inherited orphan grief” and translate it into a fugitive motion that allows her access into the inaccessible: into South Korea, into the border marked by the DMZ, into North Korea, a pool of black in satellite images. After watching a documentary film featuring a young North Korean exile, Lee writes, “I realize that the only documents that attest to his life could very well be the footage that was used in that film. And I was observing the recreated light patterns of what had once echoed off his body and into the camera’s lens, captured.” Like this film, the poem is also a preservation device for an erased historical record, one that cannot be recounted but whose unknowability can be mourned. The poem becomes elegiac for all the light that died before it could be cast upon a body, before it could be absorbed and preserved in textual ecologies. And in this process of recording light, the poet also absorbs the darkness.
If light comes from a transcendent source, then Lee’s invocation of sal’puri dance at the end of the collection returns us to a plane of immanence. During an exorcism, the shaman removes the sal, the curse, absorbing it into herself. Sal’puri is the ritual dance performed afterward that banishes the sal from the shaman’s psyche. This dance is an infusion of supplication and elegy: “A poem. A dance. And the light was brought down. / I, too, would like to call down the light and be healed.” The ritual is a solo performance featuring the eldest dancer in the group dressed in a white hanbok and beo-seon socks, waving a white silken scarf. Her movements lack metronomic technique; each gesture is restrained as a way to demonstrate the dancer’s containment of surging emotion, her ability to subdue the manifest pain as it circulates—“to witness a is to observe a magnitude in motion.” This form of purification translates pain into beauty, an exorcism post-exorcism that transmutes “inherited orphan grief” into whatever comes “after frozen waterfalls with broken teeth. After darkness. After all needle thin rays of starlight in black gale.” Its layered distillation is a way of being-together with the dynamic undercurrent of forces unseen and unborn. It is the role of a shaman to dispel “this amber dark calling,” or the emotion that Koreans call han ()—a combination of hatred, bitterness, and a sense that a profound injustice remains unavenged—for the exigency of collective survival.
The core progression of the collection mirrors the temporal pacing of sal’puri dance, a series of trance-like gestures that slowly increase in amplitude. After a phase of slow, rhythmic gestures called orunum hyong, the dance heightens its voltage and comes to a climactic release, the poo-num hyong. In the finale, the shaman returns to her original location on stage, signifying the beginning of a new karmic cycle cleansed of prior accumulation. Lee is left with more questions than answers at the end of her investigation of light, forcing her to shift her mode of inquiry toward new terrains: “I feel certain I am on the right track. / I move slowly through the hoarfrost. / I wander off the trail.” But instead of illuminating the contours of this new cartography, the collection leaves us with a sense of profound uncertainty—an uncertainty that signifies opening instead of closure, an elliptical motion that traces the non-teleology of suffering and healing.
In her travels we encounter various ghostly presences: the speaker’s son’s “coal dark eyes wrapped with filmy gauze,” and father’s lost mother, the North Korean boy in the documentary film. The landscape is otherwise barren besides these hazy summonings, impossible presences that illuminate the way. These spectral visitations punctuate the relationship between the orphan and the exile: fates linked by their sourcelessness, unable to properly mourn a lost object that was never formed: “I can’t account for the things I never had.” In the poem “I Relinquish, A Mother Inside,” Lee describes her former home in Korea, explicating a profound alienation from the memory itself: “I can’t remember very much from that time. Images appear to me like badly exposed film stills, or as though I am hovering high up above them and peering down. Certain details are clear—a glint of light off a building at noon. Strangely, I see myself in these memories. I was not at home in my own body, but dwelling elsewhere.” This dissociation is a protective mechanism that percolates through the text, a dissociation that reveals the speaker’s vulnerability in the process of transcription. This poem is formally distinct in its prose blocks followed by sparse words placed inside porously lined square borders. The words “thin streak of sunlight / on the pale wooden floor” and “despondency” are framed by black squares as if we are viewing a photograph, accentuating Lee’s dissonance from her past like a memory you can only recollect because someone else promises you were there.
Lee writes that she often didn’t speak aloud for days during her catabasis. While describing one unexpected encounter with a Filipina woman in an Icelandic gas station, she says, “Her eyes gleamed with sudden wetness. I saw what I infrequently see in other Asian women’s eyes when we encounter each other in various abandonments. Kin.” These intimacies born from mutual ruination litter the text, other light-deflecting bodies displaced and embittered anonymously alongside her. In an epigraph, Claire Callahan writes that North Korean propaganda reveals “the orphan to be the national symbol of North Korea, the figure, it seems, most capable of being revolutionary. After all, just as the orphan is a broken link in a chain, so revolutions seek to create a radical break in history.” The pain of this valorization is potent through the text, the pain of dehumanization into a symbolic register. The invocation of other exiles suggests an intimacy that is not based on a shared knowledge of common ancestry. In this discursive reckoning, these nameless encounters are a way of recognizing how unevenly a collective is formed: “these orphans populate my spirit. And I of them, too.” In Brian Reed’s Arcade Salon essay on Lee’s poem “Korea” published in a special issue in Arcade on contemporary Asian American poetry, he writes, “Lee starts with a classic immigrant tableau—I live here but my real home is there, the country on the other side of the sea—and then complicates it, suggesting that for someone like her ‘home’ is neither the nation of residence nor the country of origin but instead a ‘Par Avion construct,’ a replacement for the land of her ancestors, a purely textual and fanciful creation.” In these “textual creations,” the poem becomes a site of witness, a virtual ether, a cartography of ghosts.
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Aerial Concave without Cloud. By Sueyeun Juliette Lee. Brooklyn: Nightboat Books, 2022. 128 pp. $16.95, paper.
