Description
Winner of the Spring 2021 Black River Chapbook Competition
Poet Gaia Rajan’s second short collection is a razor-sharp interrogation of queer Asian American identity, intergenerational trauma, and the detritus of American achievement. Here, lineage is at once redemptive and violent: “Sometimes / when people say I’m killing it I remember everything / exemplary I know or ever will traces back to a small girl / on the floor praying please, please, make them see me.”
In this steely gut-punch of a collection, Rajan’s speakers don’t flinch, even when confronted with their own dissolution. They haunt ghost towns and cheer on bank robbers; they wake in the middle of the night with visceral dreams of a centuries-old genocide, trying to remember “how to coax a howl to eat;” they grasp for myths sturdy enough to hold, emerging empty-handed and furious. Killing It is vibrant, disquieting, a collection that demands to be read with reverence and abandon.
FROM KILLING IT
Ghost Town, Ohio
Anything can be a spinning tire or anything can be a dead end
speckled with spit or anything can be a memorial
if you look hard enough. So I name this town, the hunger
of its dogs. I search for scuff marks on the statues,
take them as evidence of the living. Hear the rain against
an abandoned roof and think of the water
on my father’s hands ten years ago, his head bent in the sink
after a day at the hospital, scrubbing and scrubbing
until his skin dissolved. Like him,
I enter the horizon and promise to keep quiet. I circle
the map where my parents grew up, circle the town begging
for someone to reply. I bless the doe sleeping on the road
before I see she’s full of bullets. I whisper my name
in a church and call the echo my ancestor, angel
smacking her lips on the hard syllables. The dogs bark
but do not get up to beg. My father gave me
the posture of a guillotine, ready always
for the war years. I have an accent
in every language. This town doesn’t remember
it was once a town. My father on the phone
wants to know what I’m looking for.
