located isolation - lisa asagi

Among the disparate poets we read this week, I feel particularly compelled by Lisa Asagi. There was something so unsettling in the poems we read, something that made me feel like someone who I was very close to me was telling me what it felt like to be in a particular place and feel deeply uprooted inside it.

April 14th, April 15th and April 22nd are mysterious and wide poems, while they are so rooted in a particular and compressed feeling house. "My sister's house." Particularly, on the bedroom floor on the second floor, in the hallway at night, just outside the house in the cul-de-sac. We might, as readers, imagine this as a suburban house - carpeted, with fixtures and well lit, in a "safe" neighborhood where people know one another's names. What we might extend our assumptions out to be middle class, mostly white enclaves. Off the bat, Asagi tells us that this is not the speaker's home; she is familiar with it, but does not feel a deep sense of belonging in the house. There is such loneliness in these small prose poems. A quite voice, almost as if whispering and certainly narrated with a thundering silence of around her.

We know very little of the context here. We don't know where the speaker is geographically, or where the others in the house are. Perhaps the others are asleep or they are gone for a while. We know that there are children, the nephews or neices of the speaker. We know that this is a short stay from this moment - a little over a week - despite knowing nothing of how long she's been there or why she came.  What we do know is an overwhelming sense of loneliness, of isolation and of depression.

How it seems to have grown into an impossible thing. The motions of living. The way the air is unable to be still even in this room.

She longs for stillness, for sleep, but can't find either in the dark and quiet of the night. She listens to the mundane quotidian motions of time and physical  structure, but with a distance that can I can only describe as having a sense of entrapment in the comfort of it.

I tried to research Lisa Asagi, at once feeling a kinship and a mystery to the sentiment she works with. I found out very little - a few chapbooks publishes and readings here and there. The she was raised on a chicken hatchery in Honolulu. Reading the Soundtrack from Home Movie Num. 3 I found it. She's queer! And that kinship I felt was of a sense of isolation in the midst of family, and the confusion of moving in and out of comfortable but not entirely accepting spaces. That sometimes it feels desperate inside a place of familiarity to stay because part of a self isn't fully embraces, but that leaving home is a tremendously orphaning and strenuously lovely act.


it feels like one by one ropes are being untied and tossed onto a boat I am standing on. It is rocking. It is slowly sinking. And tonight it feels like I am getting ready to swim for a long time.

and then, in Home Movie:

What is true is that secrets do not have to be lies.

I found many connections to the other poets we read in this section. In the tensions between family and home/origin with identities and desires that pull people away from those places. I'm excited to talk more about this kind of hybidity and how it shows up in form and syntax.