Jaclyn Desforges Reviews Saturn Peach and Interviews Lily Wang
Saturn Peach. Lily Wang. Gordon Hill Press. $20.00, 86pp., ISBN: 978-1-774220-11-5
I can’t write about poetry these days without mentioning the backdrop: the profound strangeness that has settled over the globe, the unsettling split between before and after. Remember when we used to feel guilty for staying home in our pyjamas, and proud of ourselves for going to parties (or was that just me?) Remember shopping for groceries bare-faced? Now that the rules have changed and reality has gone topsy-turvy, it’s tough to know what to do with this new world. What do we even read?
Poetry always calms me down in times of chaos. Maybe it’s because it makes a kind of dream-sense, a logic that doesn’t depend on reason. It’s a comfortable form to snuggle up with when external things go awry.
On a moonless night, Lily Wang’s poetic debut Saturn Peach (Gordon Hill Press, 2020) is reflective paint in the dark. Wang leads us by the hand through five sections of poems that feel like tiny, complete universes. Memories and futures intermingle as time rewinds, rebounds, contracts. This is a book to surrender to, not analyze. It’s a friend in the passenger seat on a long, unexpected road trip, cracking jokes so I feel less afraid.
One reality crosses with another, hashes, she is pressed against the crisscross she is: unshaped: lopped: repackaged or – broken out of? She is a girl. She is a boy. It does not matter.
– From “This Poem”
Wang’s poems are sad and funny and sweet. When I read them, I feel like the moments she’s gathered are stretched out before me in a kind of linear fashion, like I have some control or knowledge over where I’m going. Then all of a sudden she’ll send me back to the beginning with a surprising bit of repetition, a rewinding. It’s sort of like a choose your own adventure book, but with fewer decisions and a charming tour guide.
A Saturn peach, in case you’re wondering, is flatter than an ordinary peach. It sort of looks like a doughnut, or a small pumpkin. It sort of looks like the rings of Saturn, which makes this fruit appear both cosmic and familiar. Wang’s collection feels that way, too. It’s a book to ponder dreamily while eating a small, careful dessert in the park.
These poems abound with pleasure and wordplay. Read this book if you like tiny stories, shifting timelines, and dreamy stanzas to repeat to yourself over and over. At once grounding and ethereal, abstract and accessible, Saturn Peach should be read slowly, thoroughly, and more than once.
Q&A with Lily Wang
Jaclyn Desforges: What was it like releasing your first full-length collection amidst the chaos of 2020?
Lily Wang: I had this great desire to make something, and I did it, ah. Everything that comes after is bonus. Except I wish poets got a living pay.
JD: Which is your favourite poem in your collection and why?
LW: “All the things you have are real” because it was raining and I said a few words to my dad about the rain.
JD: Repetition and rewinding are everywhere in Saturn Peach. How did your relationship to time and memory evolve over the course of writing these poems?
LW: Rowing away from myself into myself. Slippery to grasp this — at once anticipating the future self and being that self, already, you’re always you. The fear, this shedding, but none of it is lost. Derrida repeating (always this promise of return) return, it will return. And, like Derrida says, I love memory! (Even the grief – but).
Some past events I cannot articulate, cannot return (to) with precision, such is the generosity of poetry. Reading and promoting SP is embarrassing because I did not collect these poems with the intention of making them a collection (how could I not know what I was doing! I knew), but only, after a course of living, to spread my hands out. Truth-eclipses, as is the Gemini way.
To write “I,” what other than to hold the self accountable (even in fiction/dream). To (shimmering, multiple) respond. (Land on a velvet waterlily, land back down.)
JD: What does your creative process look like now, and how has it evolved over time?
LW: I want to enjoy things. I look forward to breakfast and sunlight, a clean table. If I’m moved to write about these things I do. As a teenager I was definitely swayed by the romanticization of “sad, lonely, writers” and I hope young people won’t believe that now! Listen, there’s nothing funnier than being a poet. You sit down and you write about a little red wheelbarrow. LOL.
JD: What creative self-care practices nourish you?
LW: I rely a lot on other people. I’ll go on walks with my sisters and talk to them about my ideas, or send writing to my friends. I can’t do it alone.
JD: What are you thinking deeply about lately?
LW: I guess my novel, since I’m writing it. I thought very hard about this question.
JD: What's next for you?
LW: My “thesis” novel is almost complete. I wrote it almost entirely in quarantine, which is, exhausting. I’m not sure if by the time this interview is published I’ll have successfully defended my thesis or not. I’m very amused and look forward to my “defence”.
I won’t tell you the title yet, but the book is interested in the subjective act of repetition within the individual psyche, focusing on what it means to circumnavigate or rise above oneself, especially the self of the first-generation immigrant. A decorative way of saying I wrote a book about grief, and how in my experience as an immigrant I can never mourn “successfully,” can never separate “mourning” from “melancholia.” OH I’m writing about ghosts.
(I really hope I can share my fiction with everyone soon). (Makes me nervous just to hope.)
Jaclyn Desforges is the author of a picture book, Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020), and a forthcoming poetry collection with Palimpsest Press. Jaclyn is a Pushcart-nominated writer and the winner of the 2018 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices award, the 2019 Hamilton Public Library Freda Waldon Award for Fiction, the 2019 Judy Marsales Real Estate Ltd. Award for Poetry, and a 2020 Hamilton Emerging Artist Award for Writing. Her first chapbook, Hello Nice Man, was published by Anstruther Press in 2019. Jaclyn’s writing has been featured in Room Magazine, THIS Magazine, The Puritan, The Fiddlehead, Contemporary Verse 2, Minola Review and others. Jaclyn is currently writing a collection of short fiction with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts. She is an MFA candidate in the University of British Columbia’s creative writing program and lives in Hamilton with her partner and daughter.
Follow Jaclyn on Twitter @jaclyndesforges and on Instagram @jaclyndesforges