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A Bad Girl's Book of Animals
The poems here are little and fragile. They are old women dying alone in drafty back bedrooms. If you enter, you have to be quiet-they have important things to say, but you'll need to lean in to hear them. Every word Wong May writes in this, her first collection of poems, is important because she writes as if she has few to spare, as if she's going to die before she gets to the end each of poem. In "Point of View", I imagine just that-longer lines like deeper breaths getting shorter (shallower), two-line stanzas like heart beats getting weaker until the last stanza is erratic:
These are transparencies between time & space,
Pork-rinds which when held against light
Yield to sight pores thru which a pig
Once perspired. A pig is on fire!
Killing itself at 365 m.p.h., and
There will be no
Death, I am
(I am afraid)
Fascinated
In this poem, we are given a pig. As promised in the title, this is a book of animals. This is a book where each poem uses an animal to chew (pigs, dogs, cows, tigers, etc.) and peck (chickens, black birds, etc.) at our sensibilities, where an animal manifests itself as our own sense of fear, where an animal, in a sense, becomes a mascot for our own deaths. Wong May is dying here, figuratively of course, and at her figurative bedside are animals. Some of the few poems where animals are not in attendance are the poems directly written to her mother. Perhaps the animal manifestation in these cases must remain implied. The figurative death in "Dear Mama" is in her own abandonment of her mother in China (presumably to come to the States):
By the same token I leave you,
I leave myself (with you). The
going forth
henceforth a grafted green
fit to live
or die.
By the same token I leave
you living,
dying, or
unfit for both, waiting
for my return: Your
big eyes,
short arms
that I inherited, failed.
In a poem not addressed to her mother, where animals manifest themselves as signifiers of death, an old lady is looking for birthday cards at Kresge, "Bending over/the birthday cards (like/a camel on 3 legs) the old lady//asks me to pick her one/her mouth is chicken-blood fresh". The birthday cards are reminders of our impending fate, and by comparing the old lady to a camel, Wong May manages to convert one our most durable, life-giving animals into one about to collapse into its unavoidable doom. The blood of chickens, one of our most fragile animals, is shed unendingly, but because the blood is fresh, it is full of life and offers a sharp juxtaposition to the images that come just before it.
These poems are not Haiku. But, like Haiku, there is so much weight in what is not being said. There is a wordlessness here that is so profound-Wong May is very careful with the words she doesn't include. BGBOA is an experiment perhaps in Haiku that has unraveled itself, has become completely undisciplined, but retains that core minimalism from when it was once tightly wound. Please, Wong May, break my heart at the end of "Apology" with syllables achingly close in count to that of Haiku:
You owe me just this:
A bundle of dead birds.
I won't want it.
Please Wong May, in "The American Best Seller", scare the bejeezus from me with your wordlessness:
"This is me your
murderer calling from
Florida at 3:15
sorry to wake you
up I'm describing
that scene
I need your
help." Let me
think
about it
I say, and I
walk barefoot
to the bathroom
& wash my face
In their unraveling from the traditional form, a perfect lack of balance has been found. The bulk of these poems make me incredibly uneasy-particularly because of all that is missing. But also because Wong May sheds a good amount of blood and she has a dirty mouth-it is all really very becoming. She doesn't close the doors that she opens, and worse yet, she opens the doors that are already open, and closes the doors that are already closed. Perhaps these are David Ignatow poems that she has written, that have been pecke...
These are transparencies between time & space,
Pork-rinds which when held against light
Yield to sight pores thru which a pig
Once perspired. A pig is on fire!
Killing itself at 365 m.p.h., and
There will be no
Death, I am
(I am afraid)
Fascinated
In this poem, we are given a pig. As promised in the title, this is a book of animals. This is a book where each poem uses an animal to chew (pigs, dogs, cows, tigers, etc.) and peck (chickens, black birds, etc.) at our sensibilities, where an animal manifests itself as our own sense of fear, where an animal, in a sense, becomes a mascot for our own deaths. Wong May is dying here, figuratively of course, and at her figurative bedside are animals. Some of the few poems where animals are not in attendance are the poems directly written to her mother. Perhaps the animal manifestation in these cases must remain implied. The figurative death in "Dear Mama" is in her own abandonment of her mother in China (presumably to come to the States):
By the same token I leave you,
I leave myself (with you). The
going forth
henceforth a grafted green
fit to live
or die.
By the same token I leave
you living,
dying, or
unfit for both, waiting
for my return: Your
big eyes,
short arms
that I inherited, failed.
In a poem not addressed to her mother, where animals manifest themselves as signifiers of death, an old lady is looking for birthday cards at Kresge, "Bending over/the birthday cards (like/a camel on 3 legs) the old lady//asks me to pick her one/her mouth is chicken-blood fresh". The birthday cards are reminders of our impending fate, and by comparing the old lady to a camel, Wong May manages to convert one our most durable, life-giving animals into one about to collapse into its unavoidable doom. The blood of chickens, one of our most fragile animals, is shed unendingly, but because the blood is fresh, it is full of life and offers a sharp juxtaposition to the images that come just before it.
These poems are not Haiku. But, like Haiku, there is so much weight in what is not being said. There is a wordlessness here that is so profound-Wong May is very careful with the words she doesn't include. BGBOA is an experiment perhaps in Haiku that has unraveled itself, has become completely undisciplined, but retains that core minimalism from when it was once tightly wound. Please, Wong May, break my heart at the end of "Apology" with syllables achingly close in count to that of Haiku:
You owe me just this:
A bundle of dead birds.
I won't want it.
Please Wong May, in "The American Best Seller", scare the bejeezus from me with your wordlessness:
"This is me your
murderer calling from
Florida at 3:15
sorry to wake you
up I'm describing
that scene
I need your
help." Let me
think
about it
I say, and I
walk barefoot
to the bathroom
& wash my face
In their unraveling from the traditional form, a perfect lack of balance has been found. The bulk of these poems make me incredibly uneasy-particularly because of all that is missing. But also because Wong May sheds a good amount of blood and she has a dirty mouth-it is all really very becoming. She doesn't close the doors that she opens, and worse yet, she opens the doors that are already open, and closes the doors that are already closed. Perhaps these are David Ignatow poems that she has written, that have been pecke...
- GenresPoetry
83 pages
First published January 1, 1969
About the author
Wong May
11 books4 followersWong May is a poet who grew up in Singapore, studied and worked in the United States, and now lives in Ireland. She was born in Chongqing, China in 1944 and moved to Singapore with her mother in 1950. Her mother, Wang Mei-Chuang, was a classical Chinese poet who taught history and Chinese literature. Wong May received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature, from the University of Singapore in 1965. In 1966 she went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop where she received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1968.
A first book of poetry, A Bad Girl's Book of Animals, was published by Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich in 1969.
While at MacDowell Colony in 1969, Wong May met Hilda Morley. Stylistically their poetry is closely associated.
Wong May's next book, Reports, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, came out in 1972. Her Wannsee Poems, written during a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) fellowship in Berlin, were translated as Wannsee Gedichte by Nicolas Born.
In 1973, Wong May married Michael Coey, Professor of Physics at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. They have two sons.
In 1978 she published a collection of poetry called Superstitions.
In 2014 "Picasso's Tears", her fourth book of poems including work from 1978-2013, was published by Octopus Books.
Wong May lives in Dublin, where she writes poetry and paints.
A first book of poetry, A Bad Girl's Book of Animals, was published by Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich in 1969.
While at MacDowell Colony in 1969, Wong May met Hilda Morley. Stylistically their poetry is closely associated.
Wong May's next book, Reports, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, came out in 1972. Her Wannsee Poems, written during a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) fellowship in Berlin, were translated as Wannsee Gedichte by Nicolas Born.
In 1973, Wong May married Michael Coey, Professor of Physics at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. They have two sons.
In 1978 she published a collection of poetry called Superstitions.
In 2014 "Picasso's Tears", her fourth book of poems including work from 1978-2013, was published by Octopus Books.
Wong May lives in Dublin, where she writes poetry and paints.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 6, 2024
A Bad Girl’s Book of Animals was first published by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1969, when there were very few Asians with a poetry collection out in the US — and has now been put out again by Singaporean publisher Ethos with an excellent foreword by poet Tse Hao Guang.
Born in 1944 in Chongqing, China, Wong May was taken to Singapore by her mother, where she first encountered English at the age of six. Her teacher at University of Singapore, British poet DJ Enright, pointed her to the Writers’ Workshop at University of Iowa.
Wong May was only twenty-five when Animals was published. This was a time of considerable political turmoil, not just in Singapore and Malaysia, but globally from the US through Europe. As the world order has been turned upside-down once again in recent years by the rise of nationalist authoritarianism, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Covid-19 and the collapse of global financial systems, the reissue of A Bad Girl’s Book of Animals seems remarkably prescient.
The randomness of preoccupations in “On His 23rd Birthday” — sardines, consciousness — speaks of this collection’s countercultural era. This verse is wilfully free, reactively so in its random line breaks, while an ampersand starting a line recalls the Beatnik poets:
That is, if
Consciousness is
in streams.
He gets up,
eats a can of sardines
& buries himself
Wong May amazes the reader often, and not only with unselfconscious language. In “The Judge”, we are entranced by the circuitous logic of a drunken sestina fragment, that has the reader checking whether repetition has actually taken place:
Do dogs sleep with eyes closed,
I wonder, the bed being
the only white thing in the house
I wonder
Do dogs sleep, the bed being
the only blank thing in the house
& will not sleep
Redolent of Wallace Stevens and occurring several times here, the repetition of jumbled phrases establishes the narrative protagonist as an estranged witness. The poem’s contested facts — eyes open or closed, sleeping or not, the blank or white bed — picture a random world. In one review of Wong May’s work, poet Shirley Geok-lin Lim referred to her willful misdirection, which is in evidence throughout.
This collection sings of the nineteen-sixties throughout; poems such as “Point of View” fizz with absurdities that emerge as though through dope smoke:
There are transparencies between time & space,
Pork rinds which when held against light
Yield to sight pores thru which a pig
Once perspired. A pig is on fire!
Its ending recalls Cummings:
Death, I am
(I am afraid)
Fascinated.
The phrase asserts the fact of existence (I am) twice within six words, evoking the insecurities of a society in thrall to its burgeoning therapy/analysis scene. “Shadow” tags the new American obsession with happiness:
Just how
unhappy
or happy do you
want yourself to
be (and me)
Wong May is clearly not happy. “A Letter” details her mother’s death:
After yours
Or anybody’s funeral,
the world is not made
Ugly for me, it is.
Further on, “Dear Mama” is vulnerable mixed with awkward; wordplay steps in where grief is difficult:
By the same token I leave you,
I leave myself (with you). The
going forth
henceforth a grafted green
The next tranche of poems here rages against all semblances of power; racism as in “Consolation Prize”:
Black on white
or white on black?
It certainly isn’t any worse
if you read the same lie.
She seethes against the dominant gender in “Small Thing” and others:
Man, I say, for
The lack of a better
word, let’s call it
a rat
In other poems May seems to use her rage as fuel for surprising or clarifying turns. Meaning seems to be absent from the poem “Absent”:
I can’t even drive you to Glenwood Springs
not even that
far a distance
of seven times seven miles, for you’re not
Here to be There
anywhere.
Until we hit the last three lines, that is:
We are not
Getting anywhere I got
to go now to fuck my wife
“Here” might be used to illustrate the potential power of poem endings, which is where she often shines:
You are. Not even
ignorance works here
In “Spring comes to Kresge Co.”, sinister observations build inconspicuously amid mundane town store realities:
nothing is greener
than the cut-throat lotion
this year, green like some
secrets.
This could be the absurd humour of stoned students but for the shock of its open, unpunctuated ending focused on the elderly shopkeeper:
her mouth is chicken-blood fresh
Like many works of art issuing from the sixties, the work is difficult but essential. Wong May was drawing lines in 1969 which are still being crossed and recrossed today, on feminism, inclusion, subjectivity versus facts.
While much of humanity tumbles into descendancy in Wong May’s view, she is the journalist at its funeral, as with the family doctor in “Morphine”:
To watch somebody
dying as in a painting
when the cool green grapes are
contemplating bruises, & the
window-panes glisten like a pool
Before the dark humour of:
To remark afterwards
if the sea throws up
please clean the carpet
“Spring Song” opens with startling defamiliarized imagery:
Those days the jays
hit the sky
like dumb & deaf
children learning to sing
It turns macabre at the end:
A smell in the room
all day with the blind down
the jays sound fierce
And you
there’s no name for it
even my eyes
are nocturnal
Wong May’s course director at Iowa said only Wong May and Vladimir Nabokov can defamiliarize us to our own language; at several points including the above quotes, it feels like she is articulating the loneliness of human inarticulacy. Wong May herself has observed: “My poems are about wordlessness rather than words. I feel that we must recognize our ultimate wordlessness.”
Following the publication of further full-length collections in 1972 (Reports), 1978 (Superstitions) and a coaxed comeback in 2014 with Picasso’s Tears, she was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize in 2022 for her lifetime’s body of work. If the world has caught up with Wong May now, it’s as the foreword suggests: what was relegated for being difficult to pin down is now treasured for the same reason.
The collection’s penultimate piece, “Remember” reads importantly, with incantatory qualities:
Remember my right hand to your right hand
Remember my eye to your eye
Remember what I could not have
to what you have kept
The imperative pressure of its title’s repetition comes close to religious feeling, even as multiple strands work across each other as balancing ambivalence. The penultimate stanza nails the poet’s seething rage against North America’s bloated individualist project:
Remember my flesh to your flesh
all our pores listening like muffled ears
Remember to each our essential selfishness
the bridge that isn’t anywhere
It is difficult to see how this collection’s authorial voice is that of “a bad girl” even ironically, other than by conjecturing a mid-century female South East Asian being drilled as a child in politeness — or worse, to withhold her voice completely.
For all this remarkable collection’s defeatedness and rage, its author comes good at the end in seeking resolution and connection:
Remember my breath to your breath
for no reason this rhythm
this perfection
Lawrence Pettener is a poet and editor living in Subang Jaya, Malaysia. This review first appeared in Asian Review of Books online.
Born in 1944 in Chongqing, China, Wong May was taken to Singapore by her mother, where she first encountered English at the age of six. Her teacher at University of Singapore, British poet DJ Enright, pointed her to the Writers’ Workshop at University of Iowa.
Wong May was only twenty-five when Animals was published. This was a time of considerable political turmoil, not just in Singapore and Malaysia, but globally from the US through Europe. As the world order has been turned upside-down once again in recent years by the rise of nationalist authoritarianism, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Covid-19 and the collapse of global financial systems, the reissue of A Bad Girl’s Book of Animals seems remarkably prescient.
The randomness of preoccupations in “On His 23rd Birthday” — sardines, consciousness — speaks of this collection’s countercultural era. This verse is wilfully free, reactively so in its random line breaks, while an ampersand starting a line recalls the Beatnik poets:
That is, if
Consciousness is
in streams.
He gets up,
eats a can of sardines
& buries himself
Wong May amazes the reader often, and not only with unselfconscious language. In “The Judge”, we are entranced by the circuitous logic of a drunken sestina fragment, that has the reader checking whether repetition has actually taken place:
Do dogs sleep with eyes closed,
I wonder, the bed being
the only white thing in the house
I wonder
Do dogs sleep, the bed being
the only blank thing in the house
& will not sleep
Redolent of Wallace Stevens and occurring several times here, the repetition of jumbled phrases establishes the narrative protagonist as an estranged witness. The poem’s contested facts — eyes open or closed, sleeping or not, the blank or white bed — picture a random world. In one review of Wong May’s work, poet Shirley Geok-lin Lim referred to her willful misdirection, which is in evidence throughout.
This collection sings of the nineteen-sixties throughout; poems such as “Point of View” fizz with absurdities that emerge as though through dope smoke:
There are transparencies between time & space,
Pork rinds which when held against light
Yield to sight pores thru which a pig
Once perspired. A pig is on fire!
Its ending recalls Cummings:
Death, I am
(I am afraid)
Fascinated.
The phrase asserts the fact of existence (I am) twice within six words, evoking the insecurities of a society in thrall to its burgeoning therapy/analysis scene. “Shadow” tags the new American obsession with happiness:
Just how
unhappy
or happy do you
want yourself to
be (and me)
Wong May is clearly not happy. “A Letter” details her mother’s death:
After yours
Or anybody’s funeral,
the world is not made
Ugly for me, it is.
Further on, “Dear Mama” is vulnerable mixed with awkward; wordplay steps in where grief is difficult:
By the same token I leave you,
I leave myself (with you). The
going forth
henceforth a grafted green
The next tranche of poems here rages against all semblances of power; racism as in “Consolation Prize”:
Black on white
or white on black?
It certainly isn’t any worse
if you read the same lie.
She seethes against the dominant gender in “Small Thing” and others:
Man, I say, for
The lack of a better
word, let’s call it
a rat
In other poems May seems to use her rage as fuel for surprising or clarifying turns. Meaning seems to be absent from the poem “Absent”:
I can’t even drive you to Glenwood Springs
not even that
far a distance
of seven times seven miles, for you’re not
Here to be There
anywhere.
Until we hit the last three lines, that is:
We are not
Getting anywhere I got
to go now to fuck my wife
“Here” might be used to illustrate the potential power of poem endings, which is where she often shines:
You are. Not even
ignorance works here
In “Spring comes to Kresge Co.”, sinister observations build inconspicuously amid mundane town store realities:
nothing is greener
than the cut-throat lotion
this year, green like some
secrets.
This could be the absurd humour of stoned students but for the shock of its open, unpunctuated ending focused on the elderly shopkeeper:
her mouth is chicken-blood fresh
Like many works of art issuing from the sixties, the work is difficult but essential. Wong May was drawing lines in 1969 which are still being crossed and recrossed today, on feminism, inclusion, subjectivity versus facts.
While much of humanity tumbles into descendancy in Wong May’s view, she is the journalist at its funeral, as with the family doctor in “Morphine”:
To watch somebody
dying as in a painting
when the cool green grapes are
contemplating bruises, & the
window-panes glisten like a pool
Before the dark humour of:
To remark afterwards
if the sea throws up
please clean the carpet
“Spring Song” opens with startling defamiliarized imagery:
Those days the jays
hit the sky
like dumb & deaf
children learning to sing
It turns macabre at the end:
A smell in the room
all day with the blind down
the jays sound fierce
And you
there’s no name for it
even my eyes
are nocturnal
Wong May’s course director at Iowa said only Wong May and Vladimir Nabokov can defamiliarize us to our own language; at several points including the above quotes, it feels like she is articulating the loneliness of human inarticulacy. Wong May herself has observed: “My poems are about wordlessness rather than words. I feel that we must recognize our ultimate wordlessness.”
Following the publication of further full-length collections in 1972 (Reports), 1978 (Superstitions) and a coaxed comeback in 2014 with Picasso’s Tears, she was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize in 2022 for her lifetime’s body of work. If the world has caught up with Wong May now, it’s as the foreword suggests: what was relegated for being difficult to pin down is now treasured for the same reason.
The collection’s penultimate piece, “Remember” reads importantly, with incantatory qualities:
Remember my right hand to your right hand
Remember my eye to your eye
Remember what I could not have
to what you have kept
The imperative pressure of its title’s repetition comes close to religious feeling, even as multiple strands work across each other as balancing ambivalence. The penultimate stanza nails the poet’s seething rage against North America’s bloated individualist project:
Remember my flesh to your flesh
all our pores listening like muffled ears
Remember to each our essential selfishness
the bridge that isn’t anywhere
It is difficult to see how this collection’s authorial voice is that of “a bad girl” even ironically, other than by conjecturing a mid-century female South East Asian being drilled as a child in politeness — or worse, to withhold her voice completely.
For all this remarkable collection’s defeatedness and rage, its author comes good at the end in seeking resolution and connection:
Remember my breath to your breath
for no reason this rhythm
this perfection
Lawrence Pettener is a poet and editor living in Subang Jaya, Malaysia. This review first appeared in Asian Review of Books online.
March 4, 2024
need to buy this book and pour over it again....there's something so opaque yet so intriguing and fresh abt it......
March 23, 2021
favourites: "consolation prize," "she decides," "remember" 🌷
Want to Read
April 6, 2023to-read
May 19, 2024
need to revisit this sometime; don't think reading it once is enough.
Read
July 28, 2024A book to be revisited.
"The insignificance,/ Mine." (A Letter)
"We are at all times the/ Contemporaries of God. God needs us badly,/ God keeps us busy,/ God licks our sweat/ For salt" (Salt)
"The insignificance,/ Mine." (A Letter)
"We are at all times the/ Contemporaries of God. God needs us badly,/ God keeps us busy,/ God licks our sweat/ For salt" (Salt)
Read
August 4, 2023oblique but evocative... has a sharpness to it...
There are transparencies between time & space,
Pork-rinds which when held against light
Yield to sight pores thru which a pig
Once perspired. A pig is on fire!
- Point of View
Mother, this is not even it.
If I say the day is
Beautiful, it probably is.
I don't affect it. Nor
Does it affect me. If I
say I love you, love
You, I probably do.
I cannot live with
Out you, yet I do.
Failing that, it doesn't
Make me feel the
grapes are less sweet
Or cool. The insignificance,
mine. Afrer yours
Or anybody's funeral,
the world is not made
Ugly for me, it is.
- A Letter
she could break
nothing could not
sneeze to wake up
her husband even, a
mosquito is doing
as she desires now, just
then it leaves him
for her
- Instincts
There are transparencies between time & space,
Pork-rinds which when held against light
Yield to sight pores thru which a pig
Once perspired. A pig is on fire!
- Point of View
Mother, this is not even it.
If I say the day is
Beautiful, it probably is.
I don't affect it. Nor
Does it affect me. If I
say I love you, love
You, I probably do.
I cannot live with
Out you, yet I do.
Failing that, it doesn't
Make me feel the
grapes are less sweet
Or cool. The insignificance,
mine. Afrer yours
Or anybody's funeral,
the world is not made
Ugly for me, it is.
- A Letter
she could break
nothing could not
sneeze to wake up
her husband even, a
mosquito is doing
as she desires now, just
then it leaves him
for her
- Instincts
January 20, 2024
Astonishing. So playful, esotoric, and formally experimental, yet (?) still (?) thus (?) punching with violent emotional force.
[These quotes do not do justice to the poetry, which is so carefully arranged on the page....but I'll risk injustice to convey some of WM's writing]
"I'll not leap / the full length of / my chain to you. / I'll sit counting links / like a miser his gold."
"Flesh / itself died / in the bottle, is preserved in the form of a bottle. / I offer / you this: a room. Love is / a room you said. Yours"
"As in the end / no one would speak of / the death of spring - knowing (perhaps) the / way must be / to lose track / of you, let you / go."
[These quotes do not do justice to the poetry, which is so carefully arranged on the page....but I'll risk injustice to convey some of WM's writing]
"I'll not leap / the full length of / my chain to you. / I'll sit counting links / like a miser his gold."
"Flesh / itself died / in the bottle, is preserved in the form of a bottle. / I offer / you this: a room. Love is / a room you said. Yours"
"As in the end / no one would speak of / the death of spring - knowing (perhaps) the / way must be / to lose track / of you, let you / go."
December 31, 2023
brilliant. reading it feels like the words are being spoken to me. i like the usages of internal rhymes. the foreword was great too, for me, someone who doesn't know anything about sing/malaysia poets in english
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews