Slow Rehearsals of Loss
Review of Focal Point by Jenny Qi (USA: Steel Toe Books, 2021)
By Tricia Tan
Jenny Qi's masterful debut collection Focal Point wrenches us from the orbit of the ordinary into the fissures of the poet’s grief. Losing her mother to cancer at the tender age of 19 must have been shattering. Yet Qi has created something startlingly beautiful in the wake of ashes: this collection has been 10 years in the making. As she shared in a recent interview with Singapore Unbound, "remembering was too painful ... so I put those painful, beautiful memories to paper." Deservingly, her collection received the 2020 Steel Toes Book Award. The entire experience of Focal Point magnifies grief in its myriad forms. A cancer researcher with a PhD in Biomedical Sciences, Qi writes with both the meticulous eye of a scientist and the empathy of an artist.
Throughout Focal Point, Qi, the stricken investigator, travels the stages of grief with remarkable candour. In “Radiation”, we are brought to the doctor’s office. With clinical precision, we, too, are informed of the treatment plan of "five weeks", of the specific locales of the radiation ("her head, her chest"), even the medical history of the "lobectomy" and "surgical resection". The doctor intones, “you’re very bright” to Qi, prompting her to lament the futility of her intelligence: “What use is brilliance // if I can’t direct those beams // at renegade cells?” Qi spares no details in these real-time, cinematic renderings.
Yet this is a rich world not defined solely by grief. Qi's scientific background provides an important lens through which she explores loss. However, in her scientific world, there are no footnotes or neat definitions. As if in defiance of science's claim to objectivity, Qi renders the likes of telomeres, cellular differentiation, and brain cells as phenomena keenly personal. In "Telomeres & A 2am (Love) Poem", the microscopic telomeres—the ends of genes, which erode as we age—are anthropomorphised into burly "guard[s]". Qi crafts stirring images fromon simple facts: "heart cells // must have the shortest telomeres of all." Almost magically, she transfigures a sentence from a textbook into an analogy for her fickle heart, that she might "tolerate / like / love" her partner at any given moment. The poem ends with a plea: "maybe we // could let our telomeres // shorten // together". Current research aims to discover if preventing the shortening of telomeres could unlock the proverbial fountain of youth. Yet Qi seems keenly aware of mortality and the limits of research; she desires instead to age in step with her lover.
We could also consider Qi's use of biological references in Focal Point more expansively as a commentary on loss as inherent to life. In the harrowing "Cactus Heart", for instance, Qi transforms into a "cactus" to avoid "[drying] out too fast". This classic opening scene in the arid desert from Western films metastasises into a striking reenactment of the brutality of loss: the sun mercilessly "beating" away at "skin until it lifts away in vengeful slivers", the wind "whipping" Qi's "spine until it pocks with hidden hollows". Here, Qi's transfiguration into the non-sentient cactus functions as (failed) escapism—the "tough" exterior is ironically fragile. Qi concedes that "the tiniest wound // might bleed you dry".
Hauntingly, she overlays her own experiences of sickness with memories of her mother's. The resulting textural complexity recalls three-dimensional decoupage. The ironically titled "Normal" finds Qi hospitalized with pneumonia "eighteen months" following her mother's death, bestially "gripping the walls like a wounded animal". The intimacy of the direct address to the mother, as "you" and the childlike "Mama", expresses the tenacious parent-child bond, which persists even after death. The poetic persona is deliberately infantilized as she reminisces about the times her mother "used to walk faster than [her]", often waiting for her "stubby child legs to catch up". Later, we witness a reversal of roles - the speaker becomes the "one waiting" in the hospital following her mother's lung surgery. Like Qi, we, too, recall or imagine the point at which our own elders become, tragically, "so cross about living // even as [they do] everything to live".
For Qi, her mother’s death and the failure of science to prevent it also herald her egress from her scientific persona. The clear-eyed daughter who once interrogated the doctor about her mother's treatment plan in "Radiation" now tinkers with psalms, horoscopes, even voodoo. In “Distribution”, the speaker “[cradles her] mother’s [ashes] in [her] lap”, an image reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Pietà, which depicts a mourning Mother Mary cradling Jesus' body following the crucifixion. This image situates Qi’s mother almost as a messianic figure in her life, signaling her foray into the religious. The role reversal of the parent-child relationship here is stark. In contrast with the earlier poem, "Normal", the young daughter now adopts the maternal role of protector, even as her mother remains Christ-like.
Using this religious lens, even the four "Biology Lessons", pithy meditations on the microscopic, can be read as an aphoristic prayer. One imagines a weary Qi scrawling these ruminations in the dark of her laboratory. The first "Biology Lesson" asserts that “cells need touch”, before caveating in the second lesson that “too much touch // stifles”. “Biology Lesson 4”, in particular, is striking. The single tercet extols the fact that “cells can become anything” when “fed the right factors”. The mutability of the infant cells perhaps reflects Qi's desire to return to childlike naivete, to recreate reality with the right rituals. The all-encompassing "Biology Lesson" suggests that even death "can become anything" with the "right factors". As Qi later laments in "Letters to My Mother", “I never believed in anything. // Now I believe in everything, // all the rituals of all the faiths”.
In keeping with realism, Qi hypothesizes that these coping mechanisms are ultimately futile. Perhaps time is the only true antidote for grief. This is most telling in the two poems, titled as diary entries, nine years apart: “First Spring, 2011” and “First Spring, 2020”. The former evinces Qi’s frustration with the notion of growth and renewal in nature in the wake of her mother’s death. She deadpans that “Birds are fucking in the sky”, and derides the generic “pink flowers” as “too eager to last the spring”. In contrast, the latter poem is decidedly more hopeful, with the “pink petals … bursting from branches so thin I wonder // can they teach us how to hold this weight”. Yet the embedding of clichéd descriptions—“birds are chirping, flowers are blooming”—makes the reader wonder if grief has dulled the author’s ability to appreciate true beauty. And indeed, we witness the “knot [blooming]” in the author’s stomach, with “bitterness bubbling up [her] throat”. These decidedly non-lyrical poems are marked departures from the high artifice of Qi's language elsewhere. Grief and absence are simply facts of life, they seem to say.
Though the emotional core of the collection is centred around the mother’s death, Qi’s “erratically focused empathy” spans a broad spectrum of concerns. Time and time again, Qi widens the aperture of her personal grief to lament over a panorama of social issues—from terrorism, through racism, to media portrayals of the body. It has been said that poets are adept at universalizing their personal experiences, and Qi indeed fulfils this mandate. Yet at no point do these excursions come across as rostered or abrupt; rather, they add texture to the necessarily complex emotion of grief.
Roland Barthes’ classic “Mourning Diary” meditates on our inability to create a “measurement of mourning”. Focal Point comes close to such an exact measurement. Qi’s mother passed in 2011, and Focal Point masterfully captures Qi’s decade-long "diary" of mourning – though, like Barthes' text, we do not find clean equanimity at its end. In one of the most beautiful renderings of the grieving process, Qi writes:
In the dark, I rehearse
my slow waltz with loss.
I know the steps by heart.
In many ways, each of Qi’s poems is a slow rehearsal of loss. The measurement of mourning evades the pinpoint precision that the collection’s title suggests. Yet the beauty of the collection also reveals that with the concentration of grief can come defiant, incipient brightness.
Tricia Tan Hui Ling is a medical student from Singapore. She writes poetry as a way of being patient with the histories of others and her own. Her poetry has been published in QLRS and The Kindling, and she was a finalist at Sing Lit Station's Manuscript Bootcamp. Out of wards, she enjoys baking and runs a global health podcast.
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