Why is the Edge Always Windy?
by Mong-Lan

International Examiner April/May 2006
Why is the Edge Always Windy? (poems)
By Mong-Lan
Dorset, VT: Tupelo Press, 2005
86 pages, pb
ISBN: 9781932195286

Review by Tarisa A.M. Matsumoto

To call the poems in Mong-Lan's Why is the Edge Always Windy? impressionist or surreal would be to reduce them to the stereotypical categories in which all writing so condense, so image-based and so seemingly disconnected is placed. And it would be easy to say that her poems create emotionally-charged moods and subtle colors, because they do. But again, that would be too easy, too disregarding of the depth of Mong-Lan's work.

The sparse structure of the poems may jar readers. Rarely do Mong-Lan's lines begin on the same margin. Instead, her lines move across the page, creating gaps and new margins, spaces and time. These purposeful lines add weight to the poems. Her poems are not poems of blocked stanzas and dense words, but are expansive, flexible:

    sea in the sky
                                    knives
                        striking obliquely army of light
                                                      beating walls
                        the aquamarine houses are ghosts
                                                                                between crystal trees
        water steals over skewed floors

only this life

The result of these constantly moving lines is two-fold. First, the spacing allows Mong-Lan to control how we read her poems—we know where to breathe, where to change gears, how much time to wait until we move to the next line, which images go together. Second, the gaps she creates allows us time to answer the question she poses in the title: Why is the Edge Always Windy?

Is the edge the country of Mong-Lan's birth, Vietnam? She writes, "Saigon's foot is bound/the city a person with amputated limb/has feet that strain for movement."

Perhaps the edge is New York: "ghosts of America roam/land of fast food/joints defined by movement/herds of taxi cabs apartments too expensive to rent."

Or San Francisco: "The Golden Gate Bridge from my window/is a red of smothered crabs/cooked in dreamfog/savage-haired/drummers in the park beat on."

It is as if, with her careful lines and pauses, Mong-Lan is probing for the answer. And maybe, with the breadth of her images, she is giving us room to ponder the question as well.