Books in Review
giving both Nameer and Wadood a sense
of meaning to their traumas: “There are
those who write to change the present or
the future, but I dream of changing the
past. This is my logic and the logic of my
catalogue.” Against statistical rendering of
victims into numbers in news coverage,
the novel revives the losses by imagining
their accounts of the war, by retrieving their
histories that collectively make for the lost
memory of a destroyed country.
Originally appearing in Arabic as Fihris
(literally meaning index or catalog) the
book is structured as a narrative collage
of well-knit episodes of magical-realistic
fiction that micronarrate the war as “expe-
rienced” by an index, a catalog of “things”
the writer is restoring to memory through
poetic language that retrieves the collec-
tive and personal traumatic memory. These
episodes intersect with the semi-autobio-
graphical narrative of Nameer’s life in elite
American academia and the multicultural
life of today’s New York. By tracing their
histories and giving them voices to tell
their stories of the war, the author reclaims
his own narrative of what happened to his
home country and navigates the cultural
politics of his hybrid identity as an Iraqi
American intellectual. However, in addition
to the acute human attention to details, the
novel moves beyond cultural and identity
politics to a posthuman view of “things”
beyond anthropocentricity.
Antoon’s rhetoric movingly goes beyond
the argument for the human cost of war to
giving agency to things and places that the
war consumes as collateral damage.
Ghyath Manhel
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
University of Kufa, IraqKim Yideum
HysteriaTrans. Jake Levine, Soeun Seo, and
Hedgie Choi. South Bend, Indiana. Action
Books. 2019. 105 pages.There is poetry that tries hard to be poetic,
and there is poetry that tries hard not to be
poetic. Kim Yideum’s poetry is the second
sort. Yet poetry is poetry, and Kim’s poetry
is also poetic in its way, the antipoem,
whose practitioners involve anti-establish-
ment poets the world over, with Nicanor
Parra leading the way. Antipoetry can be
described through its key features, and these
characteristics define Kim’s poetry as well: a
deliberately prosaic tone and form, an inter-
est in spoken language, and the use of irony.
Hysteria is Kim’s fifth book of poet-
ry and the second translated into English.
Kim’s poetry is full of a sentiment of fedup-
ness, of notgoingtoparticipateness—“futility
and vigor” as well as intrepidness. The book
reminds me of the physical law that governs
magnets: how the force of repulsion is pro-
portionate to the force of attraction. Jake
Levine, one of the translators of the volume,
writes that the difficulty of Kim’s poetry
comes in part from her rejection of the
decorum and rules of mainstream poetic
circles in Seoul. (This is articulated by Kim
herself in an online interview with the
translators.) Being a homogeneous—and
still manifestly Confucian—country, South
Korea imposes a strong compulsion to con-
form. If a person has the inclination of per-sonality and is strong enough to rebel, then
that rebellion will be markedly hell-bent,
slightly crazy, and fiercely independent.
In form, these poems range from conven-
tional left-aligned poems arranged in stan-
zas, to many prose poems, to some poems
that while left-aligned treat line breaks with
close to absolute disregard. Many of the
poems trace out terrains of action, and
put together with a strong use of the first-
person pronoun “I,” these terrains define
the setting for dramatic monologues. Butthese are far from the dramatic monologues
of Robert Browning, far even from those of
James Tate. Here, rather normal scenarios
get transformed into settings for rage and
nightmare. In “Hysteria,” the volume’s title
poem, the speaker writes of a passed-out
man on the subway, collapsed upon her:
“I want to rip you apart with my teeth. I
want to tear you to death on this speeding
subway. Hey, you groping, hey, hey, hands
off!... I want to kill the motherfucker.”
This is not exactly a strange flight of fancy
for those familiar with big-city subways, but
it’s the way that sentiment is expressed—and
that it’s expressed at all—that is remarkable.
Does the expression identify taboo? Is the
breaking of taboo itself integral to art?
In “Night Traveler 2,” the speaker casts
doubt upon the presumed goal of poetry—82 W LT SUMMER 2019