Love & Fresh Air by Pey Oh
Verve Poetry Press
Pey Oh's second pamphlet reveals a sizzling, uncomfortable Penang and a Malaysia as seen by a 'foreign daughter come home' when she returns bearing gifts:
Alone too, I can only offer kinship, marzipan, M&S fruitcake, faint carols, mixed spice of winter, holly-wreathed…
This poet carries both East and West in her pocket and travels through time with her ancestors. Her images settle as lightly as a Luna Moth. Her characters step out of saltboxes, watch spaceships on the moon, smash phoenix bowls rebelliously and answer the Lucky Cat's repeated beckoning. In landscapes full of creatures, wild boars 'come to root and rip'; raccoons are 'bouncing off each other in dry leaves'; the poet's own thoughts are 'little black bats'. From the 'small drawers' of a Sinseh's shop, she brings you 'Dried seahorse, chrysanthemum flowers for tea, ginseng root, strange black fungus, goodness knows': tender medicine, steeping the strangeness of memory in absurd joy and a lingering ache.
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