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    Dandarians: Poems
    Dandarians: Poems
    Dandarians: Poems
    Ebook116 pages41 minutes

    Dandarians: Poems

    By Lee Ann Roripaugh

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    About this ebook

    Hailed by Ishmael Reed as “one of our brightest talents,” Lee Ann Roripaugh’s fourth collection of poems maps the illusory and ephemeral connection between identities and language.

    Based on sources as diverse as Heian-period Japanese women writers and the world of science fiction, and drawing on her own experience as a second-generation Japanese American, Dandarians explores a series of “word betrayals”—English words misunderstood in transmission from her Japanese mother that came to take on symbolic ramifications in her early years. Co-opting and repurposing the language of knowledge and of misunderstanding, and dialoguing in original ways with notions of diaspora and hybrid identities, these poems demonstrate the many ways we attempt to be understood, culminating in an experience of aural awe.

    At once wonderfully lyrical and strikingly acute, Dandarians will further establish Lee Ann Roripaugh as one of the most important and original voices in contemporary Asian American literature.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMilkweed Editions
    Release dateAug 18, 2014
    ISBN9781571318961
    Dandarians: Poems
    Author

    Lee Ann Roripaugh

    Lee Ann Roripaugh is the author of four previous collections of poems, including Dandarians. Her first collection, Beyond Heart Mountain, was selected by Ishmael Reed as a National Poetry Series winner, and her second collection, Year of the Snake, was named winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award, and her third, On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year, was lauded as “masterful” and a “gorgeous canticle.” Roripaugh has received an Archibald Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship, the Frederick Manfred Award from the Western Literature Association, the Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize, and an Academy of American Poets prize. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review and directs the creative writing program at the University of South Dakota, as well as being the state’s Poet Laureate. She resides in Vermillion.

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      Book preview

      Dandarians - Lee Ann Roripaugh

      PART I

      THE PLANET OF DANDAR

      Prismed through the scrim of my mother’s Japanese accent, I think dandelions are Dandarians. Dan-dare-ee-uns. Futuristic, alien—like something named after late-night B-movie space creatures from an undiscovered planet.

      Maybe this is why the disturbingly lurid fronds seem too yellow to me. They seethe, I believe, with a feverishly incandescent radioactivity. I’m convinced this explains the obsessive, anxiety-laced fervor with which my parents uproot them from our lawn. As if under threat of colonization.

      (Years later, reading Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, I’m shocked at the thought of imbibing dandelions as alcoholic libation. I always secretly assumed dandelions were poisonous. I’m convinced it must be a hoax. I begin to distrust the boundaries between Bradbury’s literary fiction and his science fiction.)

      Because I’m the only one in my kindergarten class who can read and write, there’s shock and fallout when my confusion over Dandarians and dandelions is discovered. I receive special coaching. Slowly and loudly, as if I have suddenly become impaired: "You say dandy. Then say lion."

      At home, because it seems important, I pass this secret knowledge on to my mother: "You have to say dandy, I tell her. Then say lion."

      Her slap flares a stung handprint on my cheek like alien handprints in the TV show Roswell. I’m the mother, she says. You the daughter. As if that explains everything. As if in another year or so I won’t make phone calls on her behalf, pretending to be my own mother so she won’t have to struggle to make herself understood to hairdressers, pharmacists, the PTA. Can they really not understand her? Or do they simply willfully refuse to comprehend?

      I am five. I understand I’ve hurt my mother’s feelings without meaning to. I understand Dandarians are toxically radioactive. Just not in the ways I’d originally thought.

      And so when I tell you I’m an alien—a Dandarian, hailing from the planet Dandar—I am, of course, mostly joking. But not entirely. When I tell you I’m radioactive, it’s mostly a posture. But not entirely.

      On Dandar, we are partial to the theme song from Hawaii Five-O. We like the color yellow. All the best dresses chosen by mothers for daughters come in the color yellow. We eat osembei and sometimes mochi after school with hot green tea, speak our very own pidgin English at the kitchen table when my father’s at the office. My father doesn’t approve—maybe because our pidgin’s sometimes laced with the best new swear words I’ve learned at school. We never, ever answer the phone without proper deployment of the Secret Code.

      Here’s my universal translation device. Although when fog threads the streets like a rough, shaggy yarn too unruly to slip through the eye of a sewing needle, the reception becomes white static and everything garbles to Babel.

      Half-life.

      Decay.

      This is my ray gun.

      Do you know the Secret Code?

      HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR

      Spasmed jerk and gutter of Hiroshima newsreels unwinding inside a movie set in Hiroshima, where the actress in the movie plays an actress making a movie about Hiroshima and peace. A movie about (re)membering the (dis)membered. A movie about the horror of forgetfulness.

      It is here, inside this movie, where I will walk tonight, along black-and-white streets of borrowed time, framed within the movie set of a movie set; where brazen neon flickers numinous promises, fictional lovers first illuminated, then dowsed, like a candle pinched between thumb and forefinger. Can you see me? Will you follow?

      You’re destroying me / You’re good for me.

      Late-night café. Crisp pale beer. Shadows of moths’ small black hearts charred by the sudden flash and immolation of rice-paper lanterns. Insatiable koi mouthing the surface of the garden’s pond: like an agitation of insects against a lit window; like your face, illuminated by the quiet electric glow of your computer screen as you read; like my face, lit by my words as I write them to you.

      Here, on the other side of your screen, inside the movie taking place within a movie about Hiroshima, about the illusion of love, about the illusion of not forgetting, I will fabricate this story rising like wild iris from a cancerous gourd of ash. I will tell you I love you. I will promise never to forget. Here, at ground zero, it will all be true.

      She: Hiroshima was blanketed with flowers. There were cornflowers and gladiolas everywhere, and morning glories and day lilies that rose again from the ashes with an extraordinary vigor, quite unheard of for flowers till then. I didn’t make anything up.

      He: You made it all up.

      Here, on the other side of your screen, by the river called Ota, which runs by the city of my Japanese ancestors, near the American occupation camp where my Japanese mother met my American father while typing like the sound of rain dropping, the clouds are slung low and bruised like sulky pansies, and glimpses of the sky behind are a surreal, too-bright Dali blue. Here, I will walk deeper, and deeper still, into the black-and-white interior of the narrative’s narrative.

      CHASING THE DRAGON

      (Open letter in reply to blank spam mail I receive from nowhere—without sender, subject line, or text.)

      Dear No One:

      It is, of course, your absence that shapes your meaning, gives you compelling form . . . the very lack of you that calls

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