Awash in Elsewhere, Twisted Anew: A Review of Jennifer Soong’s Suede Mantis / Soft Rage

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.”

By its very structure, Suede Mantis / Soft Rage resists the false temptation of clarity—the book is slippery. The three parts are thinly distinguished by single greyed pages, blank space carries a remarkable linguistic weight, and none of Soong’s poems nor sections are held by titles. The book operates as its own whirlpool in which one wades. Poems curl around one another demarcated only by the reader’s assumptions; they exist as an extended meditation—the work remembering itself again and again. Through what is both written and left blank, the book circles the very question of itself; if writing around what was lost brings the object back into relief, or, if the act of revisiting through words sands memory down to dust—effaced with the next breath. She goes further: the resulting duality might dare be interlinked.

Honoring the refractory nature of Soong’s collection, I turn first toward the bookended passage of the three sections: a series of four-lined poems, one on each page, skew diagonally across from the other. The lines, tilled by space, offer combed ruts for breath. Here, the reader dwells in the shadow of the sections that come before and after, those lines knitted much closer together. This scant and temporary residence reminds us what is lost to the breath, and what is held just there in the drawn silent ridges. In the fissured space, we become undefined,

a focus group for

 disappearing things

nondescript earth

 peripheral hand neuropathy

Soong’s attunement to the periphery distills in this middle section as her writing visually shifts closer to the corners and engages with the blank possibility of betweens. Time passes by way of these pitted pages. The poems hover in polyphonic clouds, each one impressing a note typed in the slip of night. Written from somewhere, for someone, responding to what was said, what was left unsaid. In the mist of the empty page, the pointed ache throbbing just beyond the sight line comes into focus.

Soong edges this recurring feeling that never leaves and never announced itself. In moments, she condenses words to abbreviations, trims letters lower case, speeds up. Other times, her truths evoke our fallibility compared to systems larger and older, inviting the reader to pause; there are “stars in the lake / incapable of drowning” yet here we are so amenable to sinking. We lower ourselves into these lines with the gravity of what could have been and never will, perhaps meeting Soong in the deep body of “an old shirt, like a puddle on the floor.” Reading, I became self-conscious, suddenly pacing the room of this absence. What is this hold but the fear of catching oneself surprised and unraveled? She provokes this feared image in the you—the self, revealed:

come night

learn to write it terribly

so you may be embarrassed

by the nakedness of your words

This uneasy you, accompanied in other poems by the we and corresponding I, multiplies throughout the collection and gives way to a circuitous structure. Another turn and we find ourselves at the beginning of memory again—Soong’s, our own—now one more step removed. We’re steeped in what “was the world / we could return to / but not live in” and hover above the remembering of the line, complicit with Soong in the act of the return. A world viewed through vellum, “The ground moves from the ground”, becomes a shadow of itself, “These answers answer to no one” and we continue. A sonic creep.

The inevitable slip of our own erasure is only part of how Soong moves through memory. The act of return holds its own unmaking, as “I relate / to some aspect / I am suddenly not”. Yet nestled in the blank space below hides the new breath; if not this anymore, then one must be otherwise. It is in this unmapped, shifting terrain that Soong and the reader reside, with “Whole reams of sand spilling and tumbling in the ocean / . / While keeping me adrift”. Within this constant motion, the return is akin to forgetting, then to possibility again. In the first grouping of poems, words tumble from one line to another, and in their re-membering become anew; “snow” connotes absence, swings right to embrace pleasure, then drops to the memory of once-were bees. I sense a similar slippage in Soong’s I, ready to dissipate like dew in the fog at any moment yet hovering still throughout, precise as if perched on a ledge, cutting through to remind whomever—perhaps themselves—: “don’t rob me of my chance.”

In her commitment to the cyclical, Soong eddies us away from the allure of false resolutions: “The names which bent in our throats / were as sweet / as they are stone / but I forget the rest, / who I was, why we came here.” Her why remains a non-question, an auric sounding while the poem unspools. It is the who that we find again in the rummage, a figure haunted in the third section: “For you to leave and never return, who / do I have to become?” The I can no longer exist, by simple reason that the other has moved, taking gravity in stride. This unmoored who connects the two lines, the question now becomes the juncture. What makes real the departure of the other if the other is already gone? Who has one been in the meantime of their realization? Soong gestures to the I who must emerge, reformed by the mist, again, and again. Her work is dexterous in this tidal zone. In the wake of this other, the who, sometimes the what, I return to Soong’s first cautions: “As if the job of being you / ever resolves itself.” The current twists, another crash. The stones roll over their backs and we begin again.

Hoping for a resting place, I settle back against the smooth arm of Soong’s first address: “Dear Reader, / Everything I’ve preciously written I renounce. Those poems / matter little to me now. They bore me and don’t even em / barrass me. The only relevant thing is what’s left to write, the / unwritten poem.” I wonder if there is any point in attempting to pin any more words, if only to allow myself a clearing breath. Wrapped in Soong’s textured loss, we are tasked to believe in the wind. We leave space for the miracle of the return—to a word, to a moment, to that unnamed feeling shapeshifting it’s there-ness. We forget. Fog rewets the sill, “trees rupture into more trees,” the breeze picks up again. There are few invitations as generous as Soong’s into pinprick poetics. As readers, we are humbled to be reduced to this collective lone speck, calmly whittled by Soong’s edged verse, hushing about the scrim of sand till the light bends and we’re travelled elsewhere, ​​ unresolved.

Suede Mantis/Soft Rage was published by Black Sun Lit in Fall 2022, and is distributed by SPD.

Claire Dauge-Roth is a writer, poet, and arts worker based in Brooklyn, NY.