Iron Goddess of Mercy
Iron Goddess of Mercy
Presented in sixty-four fragments to honour the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching, Iron Goddess of Mercy also borrows from haibun, a traditional Japanese form of travel writing in which each diary entry closes with a haiku.
Summoning the ghosts of history and politics, Iron Goddess of Mercy explores the complexities of identity through the lens of rage and empowerment.
Description:
Iron Goddess of Mercy is a long poem that captures the vengeful yet hopeful movement of the Furies mid-whirl and dance with them through the horror of the long now. Inspired by the tumultuous history of Hong Kong, from the Japanese and British occupations to the ongoing pro-democracy protests, the poem interrogates the complicated notion of identity, offering a prism through which the term 'Asian' can be understood to make sense of a complex set of relations. The self crystallizes in moments of solidity, only to dissolve and whirl away again. The poet is a windsock, catching all the affect that blows at her and ballooning to fullness, only to empty again when the wind changes direction. Iron Goddess of Mercy is a game of mah jong played deep into the night, an endless gamble.Presented in sixty-four fragments to honour the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching, Iron Goddess of Mercy also borrows from haibun, a traditional Japanese form of travel writing in which each diary entry closes with a haiku. The poem dizzies, turns on itself. It rants, it curses, it writes love letters, but as the Iron Goddess is ever changing, so is the object of her address: a maenad, Kool-Aid, Chiang Kai-shek, the economy, a clown, freedom of speech, a brother, a bother, a typist, a monster, a machine, Iris Chang, Hannah Arendt, the Greek warrior Achilles, or a deer caught in the headlights.
Finally, a balm to the poem's devastating passion and fury, Iron Goddess of Mercy is also a type of oolong tea, a most fragrant infusion said to have been a gift from the compassionate bodhisattva Guan Yin.
Summoning the ghosts of history and politics, Iron Goddess of Mercy explores the complexities of identity through the lens of rage and empowerment.
Reviews:
Dear Reader, I don't think I've ever experienced the intensity of an epistolary 'voice' performed with such impact as this Iron Goddess jamming through the syllables of an explosive imagination, then landing, simply, on a haiku. Larissa Lai's writing in this book is a phenomenal instance of improvisation that attracts and challenges our readerly dexterity. Dear Reader, Dear deer in the headlights, Dear 'people of the on/ off switch' - Stop, Look, and Listen.
Fred Wah, author of Music at the Heart of Thinking
Iron Goddess of Mercy is a work of fierce, mad genius. Composing with equal parts chaos and precise form, Larissa Lai weaves the English language, the love letter and the haibun, historic violence and contemporary geopolitics, pop culture references, unrelenting rage and wicked humour into a polyphonic storm of meaning and emotion, like an ancient sorcerer bending the elements with many arms. With seemingly effortless virtuosity, the author spins us through a kaleidoscopic view of how empire building, occupation and revolution shape the individual and collective soul. No poetry lover, activist, historian or spiritual seeker could possibly fail to fall to their knees before Lai's Iron Goddess. Take heed, readers. These are the words of a master.
Kai Cheng Thom, author of a place called No Homeland
Iron Goddess of Mercy confronts a nightmarish inventory of the costs of human desire and ambition. Yet Lai's 'poethic' vision thrives by a poetry of grand imagination and sonic depth. Hidden scenes of unjust histories are spun out from modern life's random narratives of fanfare toward the stabilizing richness of epiphany. Here is mourning and celebration as Lai deals hard-won blows to the limiting strictness of reason. Here we emerge with better names for common things in their hypnotic globe of urgent transformation.
Canisia Lubrin, author of The Dyzgraphxst and Voodoo Hypothesis
Where does thinking go? We worry about the island of plastic growing in the Pacific Ocean, but what about the cyclone of thoughts that gather in our collective third eye? In Iron Goddess of Mercy, Larissa Lai is breaking her way through language pileups, hooking syllables onto syntax, looping modernity over history over time. What doesn't hang us we might weave into a haibun, that most magical of forms that allows all the sprawl of prose and all the precision of the haiku. 'What if, in spite of everything forgotten, the whole fabric remains swimming or stitching in fish form?' This is a tale of renewal: in the future we will all need to carry much, much more, and we really need to make light of it.
Sina Queyras, author of My Ariel
Lai allows a tumble of history to seethe through Iron Goddess of Mercy. The high energy of her playful, cutting prose poetry is counter-posed with restful, concluding lyrics, with the two becoming one in a short sequence of visual poetry at book's end. A full banquet of poetic synthesis, serving up 'the long now' and 'the wide I' - a very satisfying poetry collection.
Joanne Arnott, author of Halfling Spring
Dear reader, I'm always impressed by the power of Lai's imagination to dislocate us from reality in order to reattach us more meaningfully. Neither her worlds nor her words behave as they should. She liberates everything she touches to recombine with whatever it pleases. Billie Jean King can live next to Michael Jackson's 'Billie Jean. ' Strands of Indigenous, Black, and Asian movements merge into recombinant DNA. Dear reader, in this intense, sustained long poem, Lai finds a form for everything we don't want to talk about -"smile now I don't understand why you're so upset" - but must.
Ian Williams, author of Personals