Reviewed by Diane R. Wiener
The cover for Travis Chi Wing Lau’s chapbook, Vagaries, features a telling text-image. A bi-columnar serif typeface sequencing of words is presented to us, each word beginning with the letter “a”–from “about” to “academy”–and each adjacent to a steadfast while uneven companion: the handwritten, capitalized word “PAIN” (with slight variations in the handwriting).
Mladen Stilinović’s “Dictionary – pain, 2000-2003” is a potent accompaniment for and an introduction to the poetry. The cover reflects (in its gloss and tenor) both the poems’ and author’s spinal literality and a kind of anti-literal offering of the body. If that weren’t plenty to encounter and fathom, the artwork does all of that and presents a version for our consideration of both the poetry’s and the poet’s Crip Pride and unevenness, neither writing nor writer seeking or needing normative acceptance.
“Scoliosis: A Portrait,” the chap’s concluding work, was available as a limited issue broadside (numbered, signed, and printed on cardstock twice the size of the chapbook; I am fortunate indeed to have one of these gems). The broadside depicts the poem’s theme, symbolically and artfully. Via a printed set of green vertebrae words and horizontal bands, it begins its curved and assertive musics as follows:
Bold shape,
that marrowed
thing, thrumming
with some other
harmony,
a bastion coiled:
tighter,
tightly.
“Scoliosis: A Portrait” (presented slightly differently in the broadside and poem-in-chapbook versions) describes, abstracts, and messes with tonality in the various permutations of pains as illuminated on the cover–again, literally and anti-literally. The poems in Vagaries are “about” pain(s) and are not “just about” them; the author teaches in “the academy” while his biography, and poems, are not reducible to working and existing otherwise in that complicated context.
The feelings, the motions, of coiling, of tightness and its tightening, the bone-depth reference to marrow turned to a verb in “Scoliosis: A Portrait” each and all render this poem a pointed location for the reader to be in boundaried while intimate company with the poet’s bodymind, his biography–without interrupting the poem’s musics or in any way being reductionistic.
In my experience, none of Travis Chi Wing Lau’s poems are reducible solely to the biographic or the iterative. On the contrary, these are poems of painterly opening, and of openness. “Scoliosis: A Portrait” is such a work, an evocative “bastion.” While it closes the chapbook, in its “thrumming,” the chapbook is opened again, perhaps visiting us about something we didn’t notice the first time, with some new, subtle curvature. In my own repeated readings of this poem, I was reminded of asymmetrically lifted grasshopper wings, the angles of ears on a tabby cat (Travis: I know you won’t mind if I mention cats…!), a rained-on turtlehead tilting and lilting in the pollinator garden.
As happens in his chapbook Paring, and as occurs in new while echoing ways in Vagaries, Chi Wing Lau offers his readers ways of addressing and living with stress, joy, empathy, passion, violence, suffering, history–and, of course, pain–separately and together, emphasizing interactivity and interdependencies without hyperbole.
The poems and the poet are caring and compassionate while fiercely candid. The means and elusive yet steady matter of “Brain Fog” are at once thick, sticky, cottony, and slippery. These fogs are experienced as and through many elements. Myriad gerunds appear, immersive in the heavy haze, among them “creeping,” “lying,” “drooping,” “groping,” and “floundering.” There is also “pinching,” a “general infection,” and a “pestilent” experience of this “condition.” There is a river, with its confusing directions, and the susceptible mind is troubled. Lying lies down, is perhaps contemplating (dis)honesty, while creeping, groping, and drooping seem again to bring us into potential communication in a fraught garden where you too might meet with the poet in kinship.
Queer companionship and queer eroticism happen in the text, the latter particularly in “Fièvre.” In numerous other places in the storied chapbook, lovers have been lost, beloved lives were deemed unworthy (read: ableism), cots were shared intimately. There are moments of collapse, of breathlessness, of fatigue, and, yes, of swooning. Naming “invalid,” “sick” and “In the Land of Pain,” the poet pulls no punches. Each poem is its own body, is about the poet’s body, is about the fallibility of every body, and is about none of these, also and somehow, at the same time.
I am and shall remain a TCWL fanboi for life. That’s never been a secret.
Title: Vagaries
Author: Travis Chi Wing Lau
Publisher: Fork Tine Press (an imprint of Left Field Books)
Year: 2022
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About the Reviewer
Diane R. Wiener (she/they) became Editor-in-Chief of Wordgathering in January 2020. The author of The Golem Verses (Nine Mile Press, 2018), Flashes & Specks (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and The Golem Returns (swallow::tale press, 2022), Diane’s poems also appear in Nine Mile Magazine, Wordgathering, Tammy, Queerly, The South Carolina Review, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, Diagrams Sketched on the Wind, Jason’s Connection, the Kalonopia Collective’s 2021 Disability Pride Anthology, eMerge, and elsewhere. Diane’s creative nonfiction appears in Stone Canoe, Mollyhouse, The Abstract Elephant Magazine, Pop the Culture Pill, and eMerge. Her flash fiction appears in Ordinary Madness; short fiction is published in A Coup of Owls. Diane served as Nine Mile Literary Magazine’s Assistant Editor after being Guest Editor for the Fall 2019 Special Double Issue on Neurodivergent, Disability, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poetics. She has published widely on Disability, education, accessibility, equity, and empowerment, among other subjects. A proud Neuroqueer, Mad, Crip, Genderqueer, Ashkenazi Jewish Hylozoist Nerd, Diane is honored to serve in the nonprofit sector. You can visit Diane online at: https://dianerwiener.com.