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Night Fish
- GenresPoetry
14 pages
First published July 1, 2011
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About the author
Kristine Ong Muslim
111 books185 followersKristine Ong Muslim is the author of The Drone Outside (Eibonvale Press, 2017), Black Arcadia (University of the Philippines Press, 2017), Meditations of a Beast (Cornerstone Press, 2016), Butterfly Dream (Snuggly Books, 2016), Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016), and several other books of fiction and poetry. She co-edited numerous anthologies of fiction, including Destination: SEA 2050 A.D. (Penguin Random House SEA, 2022), Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines (Gaudy Boy, 2021), and the British Fantasy Award-winning People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! (2016). Her translation of Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III’s novel, Book of the Damned, won a 2023 PEN/Heim grant. She is also the translator of nine books by Filipino authors Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, Rogelio Braga, and Marlon Hacla. Widely anthologized, Muslim’s short stories were published in Conjunctions, Dazed, and World Literature Today and translated into Bulgarian, Czech, German, Japanese, Polish, and Serbian. She lives in a small farmhouse in Sitio Magutay, a remote rural highland area in Maguindanao, Philippines.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 30, 2011
I am a big fan of poetry chapbooks. The format, in my opinion, is poetic in nature: thematically-contained, inherently brief and, if executed well, this quickness causes the reader to flip back to page one and begin again. In her latest chapbook, Night Fish (Shoe Music Press, 2011), Kristine Ong Muslim dwells just long enough in dark waters and glass lake houses, leaving her readers renewed, yet haunted.
A short collection of an ominous thirteen poems, Muslim maintains a dark, surreal tone throughout. The title poem "Night Fish," also the first poem, begins with a declaration: “From now on, there will never be any flat land, / just water.” From there we swim alongside characters like, “that misanthrope with the chubby face” and “that minimalist rearranging his arms to fit a slinky dress” who are all in search of the “submerged continent.” This poem’s placement sets the tone for those that follow: a David Lynchian-like story that begins in the middle of things, but doesn't say so. Or does it start at the end? This ambiguity is not caused by lack of craft, but rather, by a sense of timelessness where Muslim explores surreal terrains like the afterlife, childhood, artist landscapes and mysterious dreamscapes.
Some of the poems examine the connections between artists and writers, in particular the poems “Night Swimmer” and “Hypergraphia,” respectively. In the former, Muslim writes an ekphrastic poem dedicated to Max Ernst’s painting Aquis Submerses, where “All strangers whose backs are / turned away from the light become / ginger bread men—”. The poem deftly captures the strangeness in Ernst's shadowy dimensions and lonely characters. In “Hypergraphia,” the poem depicts the madness of a real mental disorder where one writes compulsively and uncontrollably in a “watery city of typography.” Throughout the poems, I found myself wondering if Muslim has, in fact, been swimming around inside my head. Each poem captures a universal emotion -- be it grief, fear of death, loneliness -- and captures it, stuffing it in a bottle to float out to sea.
The poetic structures in Night Fish are mostly free verse, with the occasional nod to couplets and other nonce forms. Muslim’s use of enjambment could be a bit stronger; she often breaks lines before prepositions, causing the starting and ending words to fall flat. But she makes up for this with strong consistency of voice and haunting repeated imagery. The poems all connect through doorways, bodies of water, souls, phantoms, fish, hazy dreams and “limbs reaching out / to more limbs reaching out / to more limbs,” as in the poem “Extremities.”
If you read indie lit mags, you are probably already familiar with Kristine Ong Muslim’s writing. It’s no wonder this writer has received five Pushcart nominations; just reading one of her poems fuels the desire for more. So go ahead and give in to that poetic hunger; pick up a copy of Night Fish today.
Original Review on Dear Outer Space: http://dearouterspace.blogspot.com/20...
A short collection of an ominous thirteen poems, Muslim maintains a dark, surreal tone throughout. The title poem "Night Fish," also the first poem, begins with a declaration: “From now on, there will never be any flat land, / just water.” From there we swim alongside characters like, “that misanthrope with the chubby face” and “that minimalist rearranging his arms to fit a slinky dress” who are all in search of the “submerged continent.” This poem’s placement sets the tone for those that follow: a David Lynchian-like story that begins in the middle of things, but doesn't say so. Or does it start at the end? This ambiguity is not caused by lack of craft, but rather, by a sense of timelessness where Muslim explores surreal terrains like the afterlife, childhood, artist landscapes and mysterious dreamscapes.
Some of the poems examine the connections between artists and writers, in particular the poems “Night Swimmer” and “Hypergraphia,” respectively. In the former, Muslim writes an ekphrastic poem dedicated to Max Ernst’s painting Aquis Submerses, where “All strangers whose backs are / turned away from the light become / ginger bread men—”. The poem deftly captures the strangeness in Ernst's shadowy dimensions and lonely characters. In “Hypergraphia,” the poem depicts the madness of a real mental disorder where one writes compulsively and uncontrollably in a “watery city of typography.” Throughout the poems, I found myself wondering if Muslim has, in fact, been swimming around inside my head. Each poem captures a universal emotion -- be it grief, fear of death, loneliness -- and captures it, stuffing it in a bottle to float out to sea.
The poetic structures in Night Fish are mostly free verse, with the occasional nod to couplets and other nonce forms. Muslim’s use of enjambment could be a bit stronger; she often breaks lines before prepositions, causing the starting and ending words to fall flat. But she makes up for this with strong consistency of voice and haunting repeated imagery. The poems all connect through doorways, bodies of water, souls, phantoms, fish, hazy dreams and “limbs reaching out / to more limbs reaching out / to more limbs,” as in the poem “Extremities.”
If you read indie lit mags, you are probably already familiar with Kristine Ong Muslim’s writing. It’s no wonder this writer has received five Pushcart nominations; just reading one of her poems fuels the desire for more. So go ahead and give in to that poetic hunger; pick up a copy of Night Fish today.
Original Review on Dear Outer Space: http://dearouterspace.blogspot.com/20...
July 19, 2011
Night Fish is a small and perfectly formed chapbook from Kristin Ong Muslim. The poems are populated by ghosts and souls and, in the poem Extremities by seemingly disembodied limbs.
There's also a lot of water in these poems. The slippery water that eludes definition in Hypergraphia:
A
watery city of typography. All the pebbles are
letters desperately forming into words. The
handwriting is not quite legible yet.
It is the water of rising sea levels in Night Fish, a beautiful evocation of the changed (and likely disastrous) world we may face in the future:
From now on, there will never be any flat land.
just water. All words will be derivatives of
fixed names denoting the ocean surface bearing
the image of the moon.
It's a lovely, haunting, subtly disturbing chapbook.
There's also a lot of water in these poems. The slippery water that eludes definition in Hypergraphia:
A
watery city of typography. All the pebbles are
letters desperately forming into words. The
handwriting is not quite legible yet.
It is the water of rising sea levels in Night Fish, a beautiful evocation of the changed (and likely disastrous) world we may face in the future:
From now on, there will never be any flat land.
just water. All words will be derivatives of
fixed names denoting the ocean surface bearing
the image of the moon.
It's a lovely, haunting, subtly disturbing chapbook.
August 31, 2013
My review of this chapbook at this link.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews