The tragedy and beauty of family is revealed here. The poem challenges assumptions about race and family. About violence and identity. The poem allows for something less than love, less then triumph, to evoke its final response. The poem cuts through us.

Does it tell us something tender? Something harsh? Maybe, maybe not. The poem's slow subtle certainty does something more, something less. The mixture of sense and senses give us a truth that is difficult to shake. This poem's understated metrical underpinnings, the loosened iambic pentameter keep us at the table and don't distract us from this near-sonnet's drama. The form a simple stable patform for the delivery of the lines.

This poem needs no corpses eaten by dogs, no faces chewed by vultures, no maggots, and no kim chee to achieve its poetic heights. This poem, LEAVING CHINATOWN, will certainly last beyond the book in which it is inserted. Both formally and lyrically it shows skill and exactitude and lyricism that are rarely seen. I'll add that it may not even be the poem of the highest order in the book. Though lighter in treatment, MONOLOGUE FOR AN ONION might showcase what Kim is capable of even more precisely than LEAVING CHINATOWN.

In close I'll quote from MONOLOGUE FOR AN ONION, a poem that reveals how Kim works through her images to her aesthetic pleasures I've acknowledged herein. She writes, "you must not grieve that the world is glimpsed / Through veils. How else can it be seen?" And when Kim honors that approach her work exacts the greatest rewards.

First posted at THE GREAT AMERICA PINUP