In her debut collection, A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue, winner of the Cowles Poetry Prize from Southeast Missouri State University Press, Christine Kwon is giving us language. In her poem “A Chambéry Stroll,” she calls the folks who put more effort into planning an event than actually enjoying the event itself “chaos people,” a name I can attach only too well to those folks who have found themselves at six parties and tagged in a dozen stories by four in the morning. Kwon writes in “All the Witches,” “I might only be an evening/in an evening dress/but I am trying at the other thing too,” and somehow she makes something so normal (in this case her speaker is in their PJs, writing) become something quite profound. Her speaker is ordinary, but daring to be more than that. Her speaker is following in the footsteps of people who were also ordinary, but became more than that.
I feel my pulse when I read these lines. As with any other piece of writing that performs, that does the “thing” (and you know what “thing” I’m talking about), that sticks its hand out and calls itself art, I leave this collection hungry for the world around me, with new names to call my surroundings and new streets I can walk my brain down. I think of my lovers and remember the stanza from “5th Avenue:” “the softest parts/Of a hundred thousand boys/can be jammed into one word--/Peony.” Oh, how I want to rock that flower, how I have rocked that flower a thousand times. I read the entirety of “Le Friday” and I feel as if nobody has fully put into words so well the fleeting moments of rest that are gone in an instant, even though our hearts “Hold on like a cat/To a string of sun.” These moments die all too quickly.
This collection is of a moment that is equally contemporary and timeless. Kwon is partying with writers who have long since died in “The Blue Feast” and imagining how we’ll adopt great literature in a future time, a time when the “unlikeable” writers of today die in “Book Sale,” when we will finally find them likable. While the sentiment in “Book Sale” takes on a matter-of-fact morbidity about the death of writers (“people [who] are unlikeable”) and how once they die we’ll finally find their lives tragic and fascinating, “Book Sale” is also interrogating the idea of how our perceived image is constantly in flux. One day we are disliked and the next we are praised.
This is a book about possibility. This book talks about the selves that we are and could become. Even in the title poem, “A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue,” Kwon writes “I live inside a summons,” and she summons a river, she summons us to a party, she thanks us for answering her summons and then we’re in a tower in a castle looking at Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sister’s copy of her poems until suddenly we’re not there at all--we’re in a cathedral looking at the singular spot on Mary’s blue dress that’s been:
“blighted white
in one ripple
as if the sun has
tortured it
for years
with relentless
fixation
now you see
where I live
in some spotless
and”
and that’s it. That’s the final poem. That is A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue. This final image suggests a burning spotlight of possibility that bleached the most perfect blue of Jesus Christ’s mother’s robe completely white. I have seen others call Kwon’s surreal, which reminds me of another famous surreal poet, Alejandra Pizarnik, who writes about light: “The light is an excess of too many things that are too far away.” Embracing her literary tradition, Christine Kwon is similarly playing with the excess of this light. She is tortured by the excess, and is daring to take more steps towards that excess.
This collection explores the possibilities of what her speakers could have become and faces the reality of who they already are, which, fortunately for the speakers, is constantly changing. They build themselves one poem, one reader at a time. She creates language through exploration on the page in a way that leads to questions like “what am I supposed to make of this?” “Why did she do that?” But isn’t it wonderful that Kwon’s poetry can bear all of these musings of which the answer feels like it could be simultaneously simple and complex?
There is a skilled poet afoot down there in the strip between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi, in the great city of New Orleans, and I am very much looking forward to seeing what Christine Kwon has in store for us.
If you want to see more of Christine, buy her book, and check out more of her work, visit her website, https://christinekwonwrites.com/.
A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue by Christine Kwon, Southeast Missouri State University Press, $16
Parker Logan (he/him) is a poet/short story writer from Orlando, FL. He currently lives in Baton Rouge, LA where he is pursuing an MFA in creative writing. His work can be found in Split Lip, Ghost City Review, and the Yalobusha Review, where he was selected by CT Salazar as the 2023 Yellowwood Poetry Prize winner. He is the former director of The Delta Mouth Literary Festival and the incoming EIC of the New Delta Review.