Yearling

this is the best work of poetry i’ve read in 20 years. the meter / word sound work & imagery is so complex & on point.

Yearling is an astounding collection of poems. Breathless in its intensity and ceaselessly inventive, Mei En transforms the English language into ecstatic music. The subject here is the self, one that is half animal and half human, half angel and half demon, half child and half adult---a "star of disaster," "a bullet wounding water," "a loaded machine gun", "a whale beneath the wave," a "hotel full of hounds." It is a self coming into its own as a powerful, sexual, and self aware being. The transformation is violent, at times a struggle, but utterly inevitable and self assured. Passion and desire seethe under the surface and the speaker can never be satisfied. The Pinnochia poems call on the familiar tale of a boy who undergoes a long journey in order to become an adult. In this collection it becomes a metaphor of adolescence. Pinnochia, the child, is wooden and indestructible as it floats on the sea and gets swallowed by fish. There is magic and immortality about that state which is lost when the child transitions to an adult. The essence of Pinnochia is the potential for fire, and flesh is the flame that consumes itself and eventually must die out. Reading Yearling is to become in touch with the flame. In our everyday existence of restraint and responsibility, it's easy to forget about the animal self that yearns to flare, the desires that propel us forward into an uncertain future. Yearling reignites that fire and calls us to a fuller, more passionate existence, an invitation to "scar both star-studded knees kneeling on a red blade of the electro-heavens, and yoke the necks of empty bottles to a little solar wind and let the message go."

Yearling is a remarkably mature, assured and accomplished body of work for a first collection. The authenticity of an individual's emotional, lived experience rings throughout.The poems sing with integrity. Although sense is often illusive the reader is convinced of Lo Kwa Mei-en's compulsion to communicate. Sentence fragments are deployed masterfully amidst more conventional syntactical elements to comprise statements of great visual and sonic beauty. The poem 'Man O'War' establishes itself as an indispensable corner stone to future anthologies and alone is worth the price of admission, without eclipsing the attractions of a great many other, wonderful poems in this book.

Just electrifying, unique voice.

Magnificent cover art and the interior wording is deeper than I first thought, there are deep meanings with those them there lines which require more than one passing read to understand it's worth, being in mind this is written from a woman perspective