A Review of Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Year of the Snake

[stephenhongsohn.livejournal.com]

A Review of Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Year of the Snake

Year of the Snake (2004, Southern Illinois University Press) is Lee Ann Roripaugh’s second full length poetry collection after Beyond Heart Mountain (1999, Penguin Books), which was the winner of the 1998 National Poetry Series (selected by Ishmael Reed).  Roripaugh is an interesting poet to consider within the Asian American tradition because her artistic work has been clearly affected by her geographical upbringing in Wyoming.  Whereas so much of Asian American literary production has been confined to the Pacific West, this poetry provides a much needed and dynamic movement into the United States interior.  In this respect, even as her work is transnational in many respects, it could very much be argued as evoking American regionalist aesthetic practices.  Roripaugh holds a number of music degrees and as well as an MFA and is currently an Assistant Professor of English at University of South Dakota. 

Year of the Snake is an extremely imagistic collection.  I begin this review a little bit out of order because I was taken aback by one of the poems located near the end.  Entitled elliptically, “Hope” involves a folk-medical approach toward treating a sick goldfish.  Although the topicality might seem mundane or even completely disconnected to the title of the poem, the poem itself is lush and one finds it difficult to catch one’s breath; here is an excerpt:

There are nights I dream of goldfish,
and in my dreams they sing to me in
fluted, piercing sopranos like the Vienna
Boy’s Choir
. . . .
Their ovoid bodies are like Faberge eggs
filigreed with flakes of hammered gold,
a glittering armor of polished gill
plates, their dorsal fins elegant ribbed
silk fans that open when in motion,
and fold themselves shut in repose.
Clever pectoral fins maneuver and oscillate
like small propellers, and the circling
tails flare and twirl with the hypnotic
flourish of the toreador’s cape.  All
is endless metaphor here.  All of it (63).

This second stanza, which I’ve typed out in full, is specifically noteworthy for its sound quality.  The alliterative properties of the first four lines (Faberge, filigreed, flakes, fins and gold, gill) along with the assonance (repetition of “I” sounds) and consonance (“m” sounds and “g” sounds) all mobilize these lyrics forward within an intricate sonic web.  This stanza is largely indicative of Roripaugh’s collection as a whole where there is an obvious attention to sound quality inasmuch as lyrical content.  Here, the notion of “All is endless metaphor here” strikes against the title of the poem, “hope,” by suggesting that the ongoing dilemma that the lyrics will draw out will somehow involve the challenges experienced by goldfish.  Indeed, the last stanza sees the lyric speaker in a caretaker mode, acting as an armchair veterinarian for a sick goldfish:

And several hours later, the sheer veils
of tail and fin begin to bloom, to resume
their arabesques and veronicas around
the sleek shimmer of her white satin body—
the scandal of her scarlet cap dipping
coquettishly, onyx beads of eyes swiveling
in their turquoise socket rings.  She swam
around and around the clear glass bowl,
until my heart swung left and followed her
around and around from above the way
red-throated loons on the Island of Seto
circle and follow the fishing boats, tamed
by the fisherman, and calling out
with their strange and mournful cries (64).

Because Year of the Snake, as the title would suggest, is filled with animal imagery, the conclusion of this poem is fitting to other lyric threads introduced in earlier poems.  In one touching poem about childhood and the limits of animal mortality, “Loneliness,” the lyric speaker awakes to find out that the frogs that she was forced to leave outside in a holding container were baked in the sun.  In “Octopus,” the lyric speaker contemplates the strange qualities of an animal used so often for family meals.  And the collection’s title follows the movement of a multi-poem sequence in which the speaker considers the challenges of a biracial identity.  “Snake Song” opens Year of the Snake with this ordering template:

Ai-noko, half-case, I tilt
my head in the mirror first this way
then that—Horikoshi

cheekbones, Caucasian nose, my ojii-san’s
serious eyebrows
feathering like ink strokes over eyes

not quite green, not quite brown,
in the tranquil white moon of my face.
My blood runs hot and cold (1).

While one might be tempted to state this opening lyric sequence rehearses the oft-considered racial trope of the Asian American as tragically divided self, its rendering within lyric form attests to a more complex representational mode.  Everywhere, there is the sentiment of being halved, whether it be Asian or white, mixed eye-color, and different temperatures within the blood, but at the same time, Roripaugh effectively employs three line-stanzas throughout to suggest that there is always a thirdspace to be considered.  That is, the thirdspace of the lyric and the space that it allows to meditate on the experience of the biracial Asian American subject, who cleaved from the Pacific West grows up in the interiors of the United States.

Another important ordering frame for Year of the Snake lies in the relationship between the lyric speaker and her Japanese mother.  In two of poems most indicative this strain, “Antelope Jerky” and “Transplanting,” the lyric speaker finds herself learning various lessons from a woman that she often finds confounding.  “Antelope Jerky” describes the special recipe that the speaker’s mother employed to construct the titular food: “brown sugar, soy/ sauce, black pepper and Worcestshire,/ onion powder/ The leftover meat was fashioned/ into slitted/ strips, marinated overnight,/ then hung in rows/ over the wire oven racks.  Low/ heat for a day” (30).  One particular time though her mother cuts her thumb and must be rushed to the hospital to be stitched up.  This moment results in the lyric speaker realizing her physical similarity to her mother:

The doctor, he was so surprised
I was cutting
up an antelope, my mother

said later with
a strange kind of pride as she held
up her thumb, bruised

and swollen, the black ends of thread
from the stitches
wiry and poking up like twisted

insect legs—her
tiny thumb that, although without
the hook of purple

scar to interrupt the sig-
nature print’s swirl
and whorl, I see with a startling

flash is the same
thumb I now wear on my own
hand, my very own (31).

Like in many other poems, the three line stanzas reappear to provide a general form to the poetry collection.  This poem is in some ways reminiscent of an earlier poem I reviewed by Cathy Song in that a memory becomes the conduit through which to consider mother-daughter bonds.  Interestingly, this poem employs food as a unique way to lyrically depict ethnic adaptations as the mother creates her own dish, that of teriyaki antelope.  Whereas Sau-ling C. Wong employed the term “food pornography” as a way to describe the problematics of ethnic signifiers within Asian American literature, Roripaugh is constantly expounding upon food tropes in order to clarify the ways in which consumption and cuisine alter in different contexts. 

Year of the Snake glows resplendent in its lyric terrains.  The poems reviewed more in-depth here are just a snippet of the fecund poems that populate the collection.

Purchase the book here:
http://www.siu.edu/~siupress/titles/s04_titles/roripaugh_year.htm

Comments

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

Cool! "Snake Song" is great for discussions of mixed-race, too. If she's still at USD, that's, like, three hours' drive from me. Maybe I should go visit her! Heh.

[stephenhongsohn.livejournal.com]

yep definitely!

she's also face-bookable and good reads-able =)

must love the internets!