Barbara Tran, Precedented Parroting

 

Imaginary Menagerie

In the end it was
as in the beginning  No one
learned anything  What was alive
was killed and stuffed
put on display  The remaining live
wandered around amongstthe dead
wondering what they lookedlike
when they were alive andin the positions
in which they were nowposed which the live
could have witnessed inlife
had they not killed
the now
dead

Thefull-length poetry debut by Barbara Tran, author of the chapbook In theMynah Bird’s Own Words , winner of the inaugural Tupelo Press chapbook award,is Precedented Parroting (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2023), publishedas part of Jim Johnstone’s Anstruther Books imprint. I’m fascinated by the threadsand fractures of Tran’s first-person expositions, a lyric composed through arhythm simultaneously layered with both the breathless stretch and the thoughtfulpause. “Pregnant  my mother carried apacket of salt,” she writes, as part of the extended, staggered lyric of “Một: Rooted,” “wherever she went InChurch she would lick / a finger then press it to the fine white grains // Wasshe remembering her father and / a life lived according to the tides The sharp/ bite of salt on the tip of her tongue Was hers // the pure, sea salt sadnessof the outcast?” The rhythms here are layered, propulsive and fragmented:thoughts that don’t require beyond the clipped phrase to be fully formed. Tranwrites of home, being and belonging through numbered six sections of poems thatstretch across familial connection, first-person observation, memory andanti-Asian violence, providing layered fragments of observational lyric thatmanage great distances across form and structure. Moving between blocks ofprose lyric to more open structures, longer sequences and hybrid stretches,Tran writes of familial loss in ways heartfelt, graceful and precise, even as,as she writes as part of the extended “Interlude”: “in measured layers, offeringfacts but withholding / crucial details, repeating certain phrasings, teasing /with ambiguous wording.” There is incredible power in this collection, thisdebut, as subtlely held as it is immense.