Every Day a Crash Out / Every Day a Parade
Review of Stephanie Yue Duhem's "Cataclysm Moves Me, I Regret to Say"
“Stop trying to fix broken men,” is how Stephanie Yue Duhem’s latest volume of poetry, Cataclysm Moves Me, I Regret to Say, opens. Ms. Duhem, the author of 2022’s excellent Name and Noun (since out-of-print?), specializes in a type of free verse poetry that straddles many worlds at once. The first one is intensely personal. That opening poem, “My Friend Says,” is a snapshot of one of the world’s most common conversations, i.e., the “why do you date such shitty men” convo that every young woman has had at some point in their lives.
Elsewhere, Duhem gazes upon her own navel in “Advice Column” (the advice is from herself to herself but somehow feels omniscient) and pontificates on molars and incisors in “Dental Work.” Such personal and somewhat pedestrian fare is pretty common in today’s poetry. Ever since the 1960s, when every sensitive high schooler first stumbled upon Sylvia Plath, confessional poetry has remained dominant. If “write what you know” is great advice, then everyone just writes about their feelings, it would seem. And Ms. Duhem is not innocent of this. “Wall Street,” which opens with a news headline about how, on average, Asian women outearn White men in the United States, studies the internal anxiety that the poet felt will interning on Wall Street during one summer in the mid-2000s.
You are one receptionist of four, a temp
Tapping a pen, chewing a pen cap, refreshing
Jezebel next to someone rapping under her breath
To read “Wall Street” is to understand that young, progressive Ms. Duhem felt out-of-step with the striver, money-making Asian female demographic that she is a part of. Similarly, in “The Pomegranate” and “Origin,” Duhem discusses the complex emotions of being an introspective daughter to Chinese immigrants who are themselves intellectuals and artists. The same ground was covered in Name and Noun, but, in these newer poems, there is a heightened strangeness that cuts through. In her earlier work, Ms. Duhem wrote with a political edge that was easily recognized. Here, however, the poetry is less about identity-as-signifier and more about identity-as-mystifier. It’s almost as if Ms. Duhem knows that she is a riddle, or rather a “Chinese Box,” as a later poem says.
Of greater interest is the growing occultism and dark philosophy in Ms. Duhem’s work. Poems such as “Outsideness” and “After the Singularity, the Programmer Goes for a Walk” show a familiarity with the work of Nick Land, while others like “Farewell Spell,” “Nom Et Nom,” and “Creek” cast upon the reader images and sensations of ceremonial and folk magic conducted by a reclusive priestess. One can often forget that for every Renaissance mage like Giordano Bruno, who concerned himself with the magic of public manipulation and geopolitics, just as many enchanters looked to magic as a way to cultivate love, new sensations, and extrasensory emotions that are dampened by the demands of the humdrum world. The very title of this book is indicative of the fact that Ms. Duhem is aware of the inherent magical power in extreme emotions. As “Farewell Spell” says, “I too spoke words which shaped / my mouth to sharpness or to / wound.” Words make spells, after all, and every instance of magic requires a spell that first began as an emotion.
There are two more noteworthy elements in Cataclysm Moves Me, I Regret to Say. The first is a burgeoning appreciation for the Bible. If you follow or have followed Ms. Duhem on Twitter (@moonandmouth), then you may remember her flirtations with Christianity (the Roman Catholic Church, specifically) sometime between 2022 and 2023. That era comes forth in “Esau,” “Eve Thinks,” and “Bathsheba, to David,” where characters from the Old Testament work as stand-ins for the immortal human condition that all lovers discover and suffer. “Eve Thinks” is a particular stand-out in this collection, with the childlike Eve, who is of God’s nature, learning to recognize the language of nature, which is also of God.
This tree
is a braid pulled taut,
held up and away
from the nape of the earth.
It is tree-brown.
It is tree-green.
Its fruits are apple-red.
Its words are sparse.
But its dappling
is a sort of Morse
I think I understand.
The figure of Eve, or rather the figure of motherhood and sisterhood and childhood in general, comes into play in poems like “The Possible Daughter,” “Fourth Wife,” and “Divorce, as Discus.” Here, a hunting detective can discover that the recently married Ms. Duhem is uncovering the secret life of domesticity after a small lifetime of art-bound loneliness. In these handful of poems, the voice speaking cries out for a child and a husband but simultaneously feels uncomfortable and even a little unworthy. After all, melancholic loneliness is the safe space for the artist…
Cataclysm Moves Me, I Regret to Say is a difficult volume in the best way. It has no overarching theme. Instead, several tributaries break off from its big river and create a complicated tableau of an introspective life. Love, disappointment, nostalgia, magic, technology, religion, and even absurdism all move and shift among each other in Ms. Duhem’s book. This is the work of a true poet dedicated to exploring all aspects of life—life as it’s lived, the life of the mind, and life as it could be. Ms. Duhem has here a titanic achievement of verse, and as good as this book is, one cannot shake the feeling that Ms. Duhem is only getting better.