Faithin Omaha eBook Collection

Download or read book Against Certain Capture written by Miriam Wei Wei Lo and published by 5 Islands Press. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against Certain Capture fuses biography and poetry. It is an exploration of poet Miriam Wei Wei Lo's grandmothers' lives. It comprises two series of poems: the first focuses on the poet's Malaysian-Chinese grandmother, Liang Yue Xian; the second on the poet's Anglo-Australian grandmother, Eva Sounness.This book is as much an exploration of form as it is an exploration of lives: The poet plays with various free verse forms (including short and long line variants); experiments with the concrete possibilities of words on the page; and tests out the terza rima sonnet, the pantoum, and the headline forms. This is in contrast to Bernadine Evaristo's fusion of biography and poetry in the verse-novel Lara, which is much more uniform: being largely blank verse (mostly pentameter). At the time Lo wrote Against Certain Capture, Evaristo's Lara was the only book-length predecessor she could find that investigated ethnic hybridity in poetry.In spite of its formal diversity, Against Certain Capture is written uniformly in close third person. This means it occasionally blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction by depicting the thoughts and feelings of its biographical subjects. While these projections are based on extensive research (including interviews with the one grandmother who was still living; as well as a trip to China to interview the sisters of the deceased grandmother), they are still (largely) projections - imagined rainbows of personality that emerge from the granite of the biographical facts (to use Virginia Woolf's metaphors).The title of this book may lead some to think that this poet subscribes to the somewhat fashionable view that language lacks the capacity to sufficiently communicate meaning. While this poet does not claim the ability to communicate meaning in any absolute sense, she does believe in the possibility of communicating enough meaning for connection to be viable.