Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco by K. Iver

Winner of the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, K. Iver’s Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco is the poet’s debut collection, and an intimate tribute to “Missy,” the speaker’s transmasc beloved who “never got his new name” and died by suicide. Iver’s poems meditate on cycles of abuse, queer love, collective griefs and traumas—the undercurrents that led the speaker to where they ultimately leave us.

The collection complicates its own elegiac beat. Look to “Anti Elegy,” its lines split almost into half-lines, as though the caesuras might forge a route from top to bottom—like some kind of fracture or crack of the heart. Almost stubbornly, the poem imagines how the world would be with Missy still in it: “You might’ve / struck the impos- sible: surgery, / a new name, your own boat, & / someone beautiful to name it after.” But the speaker quarrels with the ethics of their grief, which they describe as “righteous / & problematic.”

After terming their grief “a loose dam,” they write, “Still, I talk to water that unrivered / your body for dirt. I float fantasies / of dirt that holds us up. Longer. / I say to the water if you were here, / you’d be here.”

So, too, the pauses in the poem’s lines come to “re-river” the body of the speaker’s beloved; the speaker takes the matter into their own hands.

The poems are truly in a league of their own; I’ve never read another book like this one. Such a magnetically raw exploration of grief is a gift—and a comfort, to those who seek it.

This collection couldn’t come at a better time, needed amidst heightening anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiments and attacks on trans healthcare, as well as trans lives. After reading this book, each time I see a headline that sears my heart, I think of a particular moment in Iver’s poem, “Mississippi, Missing, Missy, Miss—”: “That is to say I am inconsolable. / Every day a new definition // of inconsolable. Yesterday: I have a body / and you don’t. Today: your villain is a place.”

Milkweed Editions

—Review by Jami Padgett

THE WET HEX BY SUN YUNG SHIN

“Everything was white. My footprints—wet, then white. My shadow—west, then white.”

In their new collection, The Wet Hex, 신선영 Sun Yung Shin, born in Korea then adopted and taken to America at a young age, leads their reader through the Underworld, to the nature reserve that is the Korean DMZ, and along the shores of Christopher Columbus’s journals (juxtaposed with their own immigration documents). The book navigates Shin’s identity—or, identities—as well as womanhood, tradition, what it means to be cast away, and the parts of you that (could) die in the process.

These poems offer more than just the romanization of featured Korean words—they’re accompanied by the Korean spelling in Hangul. Similarly, one of the aspects I loved most about this book is its appendix of familial terms in Korean, under the title “L’Etranger | An Unburial | A Funeral.” The collection as a whole superimposes the words’ iterations, which Shin themself bridges. It is a “map of what could have been,” as Shin writes, and mourns.

It reminded me a bit of Mary Jean Chan’s Flèche, which sometimes substitutes Chinese characters in place of their English counterparts to form a language barrier, a blending; to put the reader in that place. Here, though, we learn the words along with Shin—an experience complementary to the tensions in the poems.

Swatches of Korean folklore illuminate the many narratives of the book, and Shin in turn shucks Western religion—namely its God—in favor of Korean shamanism. In their poem titled “Gaze_Observatory_Threshold: A 바리데기 Baridegi Reimagining,” accompanied by the art of Jinny Yu, they highlight the tale of Princess Baridegi, known in Korean mythology as the first shaman.

Shin’s retelling forefronts the abandonment of the shamanist “foremother” by her parents (she was one girl too many, born into the royal family), and its consequence once the king falls ill: “A king does not need a princess. Until.” Meanwhile, with a series of black and white and gray shapes, entrances and exits and pure space, Yu’s art enraptures the reader, the sections of the poems almost labyrinthine.

The image work in The Wet Hex is to be gnawed on, deserving of attention and study—and readers will find this worthwhile if they want to make a dent in all the bones laid by Shin’s juxtapositions and syntax, and all that’s in between. The stacked images at times reminded me of incantations or ingredients for rituals, for potions—linked back to the word “hex,” which—as we’re told—has no male cognate.

This is a collection that can teach anyone, especially a poet, plenty about themselves and their art—that can teach anyone to interrogate their place in the world. Spend some time with this one.

Coffee House Press

—Review by Jami Padgett