Conversation Among Stones

Willie Lin’s Conversation Among Stones opens “In the dream I was abducted, I thought sleep / would save me […] I thought / hives must be fear in miniature, a swarming of infinitesimal / hooks and combs with its own scent and rhythms.” The poems in this collection skirt the edges of consciousness with a spare lyricism; even the titles are pared down and primal: “Dream,” “Birth,” and recurring titles like “Apologia,” “Teleology,” “Memory.”

One of the “Memory” poems begins “Too large— / to move it we had to / deform it.” Lin’s poetic deformations sometimes revel in concise questioning, sometimes in mythic narratives. In the standout “Floating World,” the speaker asserts: “Year after year, walk after walk, my childhood floats with its sea.” The poem concludes:

The boys sail out on a glass-bottom boat, but they barely
   manage to look down.
What’s carrying them holds no wonder for them.

They grow tall and unquiet as trees.

Below us, just the sea and its noise. What we’ve always known
   was there.

Lin beautifully captures the looping of memory in the pantoum “Elegy for Misremembered Things,” which begins and ends with the line “What is ordinary sorrow?” Memories surface throughout: “Your mother strikes your hand as it moves across a cold music, ticking each mistake. / A boy pins you to the bed and cannot explain why.” The pantoum reinforces the cumulative effects of trauma, of “ordinary sorrow,” of loneliness and also its opposite: “You were always alone, then never alone.”

Lin’s oracular and dream-laden poems wrestle with the lucidity and occlusions of memory. In “Brief History of Exile,” the speaker recalls the “corona of the little lamp // in whose tired light sat a woman who didn’t want me, / as I was taught” and the “half-light of childhood / remembered in photographs.” “The town where I grew up does not exist,” says the speaker of “a place where people avoid speaking / of what’s passed.”

These lyric excavations forge their own clarity, as in “Box of Stars”:

I can make something of suffering
the way I can make something of elbows.