Sarah Audsley’s debut book Landlock X (Texas Review Press, 2023) embraces a variety of forms to parse the experience of an adoptee of East Asian descent living in rural America. Among those employed are the pastoral, ekphrasis, collage, the epistolary, free verse, erasure, haibun, sijo, prose, and narration. It is driven by an examination of the liminal experience of X, someone facing two forms of disinheritance as a child adoptee and daughter of the Asian diaspora. One of the joys of reading this book is the fissures one gets to momentarily be in with the author. That interstitial space is marked by beauty and terror, love and betrayal, coming-of-age angst, boy trouble, maturation, self-doubt, race-hatred, and strained yet invaluable familial bonds.
Find a grab bar. Steady yourself. Yellow, in the context of this book, is unsettling, blinding, but also beautifully rendered as it relates to the speaker’s native landscape. It works by way of synesthesia. Goldenrod sweeps across the fields, creating seas of monochromatic hues. In “Crown of Yellow” (2-3), Audsley uses collage to destabilize what readers may take for granted about the color. “Yellow yolks,” for example, make toothsome “cakes” and “custards.” It is the color of “finches,” lifting into the atmosphere. It is the “in-between” color of “traffic lights” that force slowdowns, and thus, encourage reflection. It possesses catalytic potential when combined with other colors. In other words, it is not a static, one-dimensional thing. It is not just a “primary color,” of which the speaker continually reminds us, but it also embodies a rich and complicated, albeit sometimes troubling, historical past. Audsley points with a deft hand to shameful views of Asian Americans. In “Crown of Yellow,” a mother addresses her daughter, using the following imperative: “Never dress Asian babies in yellow,” believing the color “Clashes” with her daughter’s skin, the implication forebodes misfortune. The poet tunes our sense-making to the notion that yellow as a race-indicator is an inadequate way to describe one’s native person.
Landlock X creates the conditions for a discussion of the afterlife of colonization in the US and Global South, which is often evidenced by racism, nativism, and forms of xenophobia. Beginning in the late 19th century, US lawmakers established the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian immigrants were targeted as threats who, among other things, were responsible for economic competition, disease, and immorality. The term yellow peril emerged during the 1880s to describe the supposed threat that the people of East Asia posed to the West. Coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, it is an ideology that exposed western anxieties over sex and white race purity, Orientalist fears of an alien other, and eugenicist-driven racist selection. The speaker in Audsley’s poems contends with a long legacy of race-hatred and racist perceptions.
In “Lament for Some Other Saigon” (23-24), the speaker grapples with her own Asian-ness, wondering if her white American, adoptive father, a Vietnam War veteran, holds unsavory opinions about Korean people, in general. The speaker describes her face as a “big yellow / moon” that “rises in their / nightmares” or a “ripe watermelon rind / grinning back at them.”
In “Case Number:K835XX” (5), internal dialogue relays the speaker’s distaste for European standards of beauty. Staring at old adoption records, which bare notes on a baby’s disposition, a case file makes mention of coos, laughter, and tremor-like movements that a baby has outgrown. These documents stamped “adoptable” had been long tucked away in file cabinets. So too are the emotions which well up in the speaker who, believing that a Korean adoptee might be forever dogged by tacit yardsticks that measure beauty against “blonde hair” and “blue eyes,” confesses how easy it could become to see mirrors as “liars.”
In the poem “Beauty Being Beauty” (37), self-doubt is sutured to self-acceptance. Imagine being a five-year-old girl, “running from the coach’s son” as he yells “Flat face!” The speaker wonders if she might always be that “questioning” young woman who does not recognize her own fingers, tracing the contour of her nose, which isn’t “flat” after all. It marks an epiphanic moment.
In “In Dear Connie Chung” (36), readers learn about the speaker’s opinion of one of the first Asian American news broadcasters to appear on a US nightly news syndicate. To a young girl, Ms. Chung was both “boon & burden, a glowing moonface / beamed into our living rooms.” To those “marooned” on islands, presumably in East Asia, but also figurative ones like the spaces held by adoptees, Ms. Chung was a symbol of success and cultural assimilation, but also of cultural erasure. “Framed in the square black TV box, you gestured, / well-coiffed from a fixed point at your desk, reporting / on world news in a French blue blazer,” the speaker tells us. In the 19th and 20th century, Vietnam was colonized by the French, so one might read the girl’s account of Ms. Chung as a zing. What is evident however is that these broadcasts are well choreographed, controlled narratives not lost on a young girl in search of a sense of belonging.
The pastoral poem is a genre that looks at rural life and landscape. The opening poem in Landlock X, “In the X Pastoral” (1), describes the speaker’s lived experience, growing up as a Korean adoptee on a farm. Terms like “a field, in the middle” without “rain-cloud,” “shiver,” or “loneliness” shape the reader’s perception of this protagonist. Here, a young girl learns “to look for tall grasses,” “lemonade / & iced tea,” and “long-handled silver spoons.” It’s a glimpse into the speaker’s world. Later, in “Anti-Pastoral” (45) the poet develops a kind of nature-centered focus. I don’t like the term eco-poetics. In the poem, crows destroy crops. X shoots the crows. The speaker expresses remorse for having done “nothing.” “Nothing” is fraught as it’s abutted by an em dash. We are reminded that “X protects the crops because, yes, / nothing about hunger is passive.” While the speaker understands the importance of thinning the crow populace, she also knows that “birds, too, have memory.” The poem is anti in the sense that menacing birds could easily be viewed as the central characters in a plot against their removal.
Finally, in “Still Life with Watermelon Seeds, Mannequins, Dead Mouse” (16), the poem shifts from a first-person narration of life as a child with the speaker’s father to a third-person mining of memory, the attendant wound or site of trauma, both physical and emotional, as an adult. In the first half of the poem, the daughter recounts sharing a slice of watermelon with her dad. The seeds invite omen as the dad loudly prohibits his daughter from swallowing them. Before we know it, “air quivers” and “the gash” on the speaker’s left knee gives way to the unhealed and symbolic wound maybe best accounted for in third person, and which, perhaps, grants the speaker distance from an emotionally charged and traumatizing circumstance. It is ekphrastic in the sense that the speaker offers both description and interpretation of a childhood photograph. In the penultimate stanza, what is seemingly implied is that men, not unlike the speaker’s dad, are often deferred to as the source of all things rationally minded; are often always in control. The mother is remembered as the blonde-haired dummy, or mannequin, that the father sits next to in the photo perhaps to insinuate blind submission. Is the mom a pushover? The speaker sees that arrangement as a “jab” in response to the mother’s suppressed voice and blank check personality. It is a sticking point for a daughter who struggles to cultivate a sense of self. Landlock X is a delightfully disturbing read.
