There is a lyrical lilt to Jennifer Soong’s recent book, Suede Mantis / Soft Rage (Black Sun Lit), one could find familiar, yet it meanders from kept usual quarters, the work converses with the breeze, its specificity disarming. Soong’s poems shift us here, there, then back—changed, “moving the meaning again and again away from us.” Her collection in three tempos carries the reader across the span of many-faced moons. Her words reverberate and emit a crosswind memory of what once was, woven with breath, with silence, with tumbled currents “crashing on an adjacent rock.”
