Standing Water: Poems

Standing Water: Poems

<p><b>A profound literary debut that recounts a child’s singular story</b><br><i></i><br><i>Since I made you, you may</i></p><p> <i> imagine I set myself on fire</i>―<br> <i> or better, say: you lit the funeral pyre</i><br> <i> from ten thousand days away.</i></p><p>A young woman in Paris encounters an uncanny presence on a tour of a small museum. A study by Rodin of the dancer Little Hanako―titled <i>Head of Sorrow</i>―triggers in the young woman recognition of her mother, a mother erased from her life since childhood.</p><p> Thus begins Eleanor Chai’s <i>Standing Water</i>, one of the most remarkable first books of poetry in recent years. It is a journey into the past as well as the present―into the narrative hidden from the poet since birth, as well as the strategies that she has adopted to survive. It is a journey about how we learn to cope with, to perceive and describe, the world. It is a story about savage privilege and deprivation.</p><p> Haunting the whole is the figure of the real Little Hanako―Rodin’s model, a Japanese artist displaced in Europe, the medium through which other artists dream and discover the world.</p>