Follow Her Home
by Steph Cha
Minotaur Books, April 2013
288 pages / $24.99 Buy from Amazon or Macmillan

Like culture or a chronic condition, noir is a form of being in the world.  Easily mistaken for the symptoms of its golden age—a particular black and white era in the imagination, a type of dress, a style of prose—noir is, nevertheless, loyal to none of that. Noir is a persistent suspicion, good at getting in to just about everything. Once inside, it sets to work, changing things—rearranging mental furniture and going monochromatic on the walls till all thoughts feng shui back to the same basic assumption: things are not what they appear.

Steph Cha’s Follow Her Home is a case of noir becoming terminal. It starts innocently enough. The novel’s protagonist Juniper Song, used to like to stay up late reading Raymond Chandler– so much so that she ruined her eyes doing it. The exploits of Phillip Marlowe served as her initiation, by proxy, into an underground world as remote from her nearly blemish-free child and young adulthood as any thing of fantasy could be.  Nearly because she lost her father at a young age, before he could become a memory that would haunt her, but whose absence took on a presence when she recognized in Marlowe the figure of a father of the spiritual variety—someone to emulate.

By the time the events of Follow Her Home begin, Marlowe’s influence has trailed Juniper into her late twenties where she lives the ethereal life of an underemployed high-achiever on the drift.  A first generation Korean-American with a degree from Yale, Juniper makes ends meet tutoring part time in Los Angeles, living a solitary life in a small, La Brea apartment—not unhappy, but not quite content—voraciously reading bleak detective tales to salve a trauma grimmer and more recent than the untimely demise of her unremembered father.  When her old college friend Luke invites Juniper over, ostensibly for an apartment warming party at his posh new Hancock Park pad in a building called “The Marlowe,” only to reveal that he’d like her to snoop confidentially on Lori, another party guest who Luke believes may be secretly seeing his high-powered and unhappily married lawyer father, Juniper—like the soft-boiled wannabe she is—agrees.

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Patriot
by Laurie Saurborn Young
Forklift, Ohio
32 pages / $5  Buy from Forklift, Ohio

Laurie Saurborn Young’s chapbook, Patriot, is a book of horizons, a book of lines – “of thunderstorms on the weather map,” of women on treadmills, of two hundred beer cans on the wall of a fourteen-year-old, of water towers and shuttered factories, of fighter planes above a parking lot in New England, of telephone poles and road kill, of “voters turned away.” The poems, thirteen total, each composed of twenty-six double-spaced lines, are each named “Patriot,” the same name as the book. This formal orderliness, along with the speaker’s measured yet persistent voice and the rank-and-file American subject matter, is in wonderful counterpoint to the great chaos of America inside the chapbook’s stapled pages. The speaker struggles to expand the definition of America, of course; but these are not Whitmanesque poems. Instead, there is a fierce constriction both in the music and imagery of these often-heavily enjambed lines, which create a shard-like collage of “America,” the place where the speaker struggles to locate herself.

The speaker of Patriot is decidedly female, and the theme of misogyny runs throughout the chapbook. The recurring image of the voting booth during an election year helps establish a sense of national urgency, and reminds the reader, specifically, of the 2012 presidential election, in which women’s rights were in the political spotlight, as right-wing politicians attacked the rights of women on multiple fronts. The speaker says, “Still throwing women in the water to see if is America.” Here, as in many of the lines of these poems, the poet uses epistrophe to delay the phrase we come to expect: “is America.” It’s a kind of reversal of Ginberg’s “America,” and gives the poems a much more feminine, feminist energy. The poems are bold, but they are not cocky or smug. They are not shouting at us. The inverted syntax and enjambments allow us to hear the internal voice of an American woman who feels genuine fear for her safety and her rights. The labyrinthine twists and turns in these poems are like a skier on a slalom – which is the exact metaphor Polish director Kristof Kieslowski used to describe what is was like to make films subject to strict censorship. In fact – and surprisingly – Kieslowski said that censorship helped him make better films. While Young’s poems are not subject to state censorship, we can hear the anxiety of utterance in this voice. These poems may at times sound cautious, but they are not afraid. On the contrary, they speak with candor, a seething anger, great intelligence, and a mesmerizing lyricism.

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