Mong Lan’s second book of poems Why is the Edge Always Windy? marks the long-awaited return of an exciting and innovative voice in American poetry. Five years ago, Mong Lan’s first collection of poetry Song of the Cicadas was selected by James Tate and Dara Wier to win the Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press and was awarded the 2002 Great Lakes College Association’s New Writers Award for Poetry. Since her poetry debut in 2001, Mong Lan has traveled to Viet Nam on a Fulbright Fellowship, served as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and most recently taught and exhibited her work at the Dallas Museum of Art as the museum’s inaugural Visual Artist and Poet in Residence. Highly accomplished and with many major accolades under her belt, it may come as a surprise to some that this cosmopolitan and multi-talented artist chooses to make her home outside of the American poetry community in Japan, where she quietly and intently goes about her work.

In Why is the Edge Always Windy?, Mong Lan continues her exploration of diverse cultures through poem sequences that investigate the landscapes of Viet Nam, New York City post 9-11, Central America, and the American Southwest. Departing from the fragmented and sprawling lines which characterized the poems of her earlier collection Song of the Cicadas (University of Massachusetts Press), several of the poems in Why is The Edge Always Windy? take on a hybrid form, integrating prose and poetry. Using prose as a strategy to give more texture to her poems, Moäng Lan adopts this technique to give the work a feel of reportage.  “I find that people understand prose more easily than they do poetry, and, in some respects, this is a way to facilitate understanding of this otherwise difficult work.” Other poems employ Mong Lan’s signature style of composition by field, the spare and organic quality of her staggered phrases dance across the page, isolating unexpected images.

The poems in her second collection mark a shift towards a more intimate and personal speaker. In the earlier poems of Song of the Cicadas, Mong Lan employed an objective and distanced stance on the world, rarely ever using first person narrative.  The poems of Why is the Edge Always Windy? implicate their speakers, engaging more deeply with their stories, whether through the eye witness testimony of a doctor working on-site at Bellevue on 9-11 in “O New York!” or the reflections of the speaker in “Ventriloquist” who meditates upon the artist’s work to give voice to her mode of expression:

this thing which wants to be more than mind.

a signpost a directory a map of human speech

Some of the strongest poems in this collection are “Rush Hour” and “Overhearing Water.” In “Rush Hour,” the speaker walks the streets of Haø Noäi visiting the familiar sites that her parents frequented in their youth.

my parents walked
these streets some forty years ago
they frequented the same bookstores walked
around Hoan Kiem lake held hand
& ate roasted corn from street vendors
in 1996 the air has not changed
but the renaming of streets houses torn rebuilt

The poem is filled with images of the busy marketplace—motorcyclists and women carrying bread baskets balanced on heads. As the poem winds down, the speaker finds herself passing by the Israeli embassy wondering if she is walking fast enough. One step ahead of a city and its heritage, there is a feeling of uneasiness and a palpable sense of violence about to happen.

The all-consuming imagery of water in Mong Lan’s poem “Overhearing Water” comes in the form of sodden sidewalks, a drowsy delta, water poured into tubs, rain water flowing off a roof, and clothing wrung to dry. The heavy humidity of this synaesthetic poem transports her readers to Ha Noi, a landscape that Mong Lan is adept at conjuring.

Both Why is the Edge Always Windy? and Song of the Cicadas use delicate line drawings by the poet as transitional section breaks in the collections and feature her artwork on the book covers, showcasing Moäng Lan’s abilities as a multi-talented artist working in both painting and photography. It was this virtuosity between disciplines that captured the attention of Carolyn Bess, Director of Arts & Letters Live at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA), who discovered Mong Lan’s work while reading The Best American Poetry Anthology 2002.

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