Water the Moon by Fiona Sze-Lorrain Reviewed by Erin McKnight
“Days connect years, years become places” in Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s stunning debut collection. Constituting a resonant grouping of poems that read as a meditation on the remoteness and touristry of spirit, Water the Moon is a work of depth and distance, its prosody gilding the reader’s senses in “movement and romance.” Apropos of tracing the poet’s culture and aestheticism, a confessional mode and self-conscious voice enunciate Sze-Lorrain’s displacement as an artist and a woman. The resplendent poems populating “Biography of Hunger,” “Dear Paris,” and “The Key Always Opens” verbalize lapses in ancestry, artistry, and geography, invigorating the poet and challenging her detachment: “ I thought that I would be alone / in this quest. But the roads are flocked for miles / with people!” And these people, serving as ancestral “passports,” keep the reader in fine company as Sze-Lorrain charts her personal route to “salvation.” Embarking as “merely a tourist,” it is her confrontation with the act of “burn[ing] everything / that belongs to history” and the notion that a life “is measured by absence” that draws forth the necessary instructions for Sze-Lorrain to map her unguided biography:
The linguistic attention paid to vocalization—specifically interpretation—is befitting to a tri-language translator; Sze-Lorrain’s voice is clear, despite the possibility that its vérité traces “a curious / life between being honest / and being truthful.” The poet’s recurrent expression of the moon as symbolic of fear suggests modesty and affability, but it is her perception of this cultural motif as “a dark force that hunts / until you cower” that is redolent of a universally relatable bête noire. Sze-Lorrain is unabashed regarding her choice to flee and continue “chewing on fear,” but her discovery that what feeds her soul in Paris also nourishes her distress verbalizes the kind of anxiety that forced her self-banishment, as in “Eating Grilled Langoustines”: for the first time was like chasing In consuming the cuisine of a “chosen exile,” Sze-Lorrain’s appetite is avid—her Parisian palate considered unsophisticated, yet no longer able to savor the “plain dish, neither novel / nor vintage” of her heritage. It is the flavor of liberation: “old and delicate, / aging yet timeless” that this poet seeks, but confronted by a Maître d’hôtel’s warning that the city will offer her no home, Sze-Lorrain attempts to hold her tongue and eat nothing. Ostensibly, however, “tales . . . about appetites / slowly dissolv[e] into tales about hunger” and her craving for “an expanse of washed sky” seasoned with her mother’s “best purple cheongsam,” “immortals in golden robes” and “little red books going to war” is satisfied only by her appreciation that “history has no last word.” It is evocative ritual that connects the days of Water the Moon to its years, Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s refined artistic appetite comprising the places. Gulping the love of a French husband and “waves of applause [that] rushed and swelled” as she performed on stage, Sze-Lorrain’s mouth eventually “swallowed the moon” and tasted earnestness in the most impassioned of prose: All your youth, you tried using words to shape
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Prick of the Spindle fiction editor Erin McKnight is a Scottish-born writer now living in Texas. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Web, the Pushcart Prize, and W.W. Norton’s The Best Creative Nonfiction. Her collection of short short stories, To the Quick, was published by Recycled Karma Press, and her reviews of fiction and poetry titles can be found at Bookslut.com. Erin holds an MFA in creative writing and currently teaches fiction writing online and in the Dallas community college system.
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