(for a less convoluted review--see Sarah Heady HERE
China Cowboy, Kim Gek Lin Short
Tarpoulin sky Press, 2012
One thing becomes another
The White Dark Man delivers the goods. Namely, La La.
Breech birth. Feet first into the world. Take off
running. Ren… pronounced ‘Run’ for ‘man’.
The MAN.
Come late across
the sea to ....
A book of short prose
poems. Reconfiguration of narrative
as... though in dream. Imagining the real.
SE(a)MEN.
floating signifiers—a whole book
constructed on them… caught in the
seminal flood. “… he is my blood father.”
My No longer ‘we.’ In fiction as in
dreams all characters are one.
Hell, Hong Kong.
1989. 5-14. Ten transgressions. The Colonization of Sex
Fist City, Hong
Kong 1997 17-32. Sixteen Unravelings
of Time & Place.
La La Land, Hong
Kong 1989. 35-51. Fifteen Disolutions. Death Comes Undone
Bound for Glory
1997/1989. Fifteen Intrusions: Minds Sprung Loose from Body’s Dream
Installations
2001. i-ii. Aesthetics of PTS & The Songbook
La La girls. teenagers
who dress Western (so far so good) to
show off bodies & cloths. Wrong La La. She’s only 12. Except the Western
part. Mother gave her cowboy boots. Listens to Patsy Cline. Her Country Star
Humility “That her dreams might be in
there. In the suitcase.” Even the
one in the trunk. From the tourists robbed in the typhoon. Stabbed & shoved
from the car door.
(SUITCASE – 20)
They took his stuff.
Because it would be wrong to
translate. To rearrange. To rewrite.
I won’t. But there are questions. There are always questions.
Such as?
Such as… What does one do with
such memories? With such dreams? When every dream’s a territory? When they’re
Clint Eastwood at the top of the stairs. And even when they’re not they are.
Ren. Run.
But she doesn’t.
(KNOWN CIRCUMSTANCES – 40)
Instead, she takes the ball, but doesn’t quite. Ball no
longer a ball can no longer be imagined as a ball, even in the dark. Rubber
Soul. Pussy of desire. Dead thing living there for comfort when there is none.
Not in the light. Blessed sleep. Keep your finger in the hole.
(AMERICAN BALL – 21).
“I’m not I’m not I’m not
what’s going on.”
This is a book of
disassociation. What (else) does one do …
She could shape a spin on anything.
It was a movie but not hers. His Shangri La, not hers. He told her about Zhang
Yimou.
Red Sorghum came out that year.
She thought, Coal Miner’s Daughter.
Wren’s Shangri La was her (not his) America. Sissy
Spacek.
Displacement. Reversal. One
thing becomes another/borders dissolve & redefine themselves.
Elsewhere.
Repulse Bay.
Never-almost-never-quite visual…
language overrules. Take over at the last minute. And there are many last
minutes in this book. As many as there are words.
“Things become
other things”
(SUGARCUBE – 22)
Make bargains. Deals with the
devil. You’ll never win… but neither does the devil.
Flip sides of the record.
The subject of the colonial
fantasy, as of all fantasies of freedom… is servitude.
They rob us. We rob them. All
servitude is sexual in the end.
Adjectives & adverbs without
compliments become nouns. A bluegrass of fogging…. An unrequiting...
Misplacement re-signifies. Shar pei with sweat Indeterminate
pronouns abound.
When the suitcase is opened the
dream will vanish
.
Euphemisms make a lexicon of
dreams. A doubling of subject…writing the wrong to right the Self. I
In Extremity.
(RUN- 25)
La La sees as green-blue the sticky slime. Iridescence. Checking her crotch. Blue-green:
compliment of red. The baby who will never be -- named Cyan. See’n red.
All servitude is sexual in the end.
(CYAN – 26)
It goes on. No soap opera. Grand Old Opry—that’s out of
reach. Instead, it’s Heidi on the bed. Wearing all her clothes. Ren but you can't hide.
Good or or bad?
La La or Heidi?
Ren or bill?
An egg or a man?
A girl or a book?
(HEIDI – 57)
Dressed for the kill. It’s what she wants, he thinks.
Someone has to pay the Bill
(AMERICAN CEREAL – 37)
Missing is where she goes. Her
mother remembers searching for the image what she had no time for before she
went missing. How to be a mother. What is left? “was it there before?” A warped photograph. Phonogaph. Country
music.
“She says so with
her eyes. I am here.”
(YELLOW NOTICE – 4)
La La: “I never got
to do anything”
That’s her Country Superstar humility talking. There are
songs. The whole thing in songs. A retelling in a second life.
The Songs are in the back (they
always are). You only have to look.
La La’s
GUTHERIECRUCIAN SONGBOOK: A Bildungsroman
pp. 101-115)
As if ditched himself Ren heard the escapes in there them
bucking
Buried instruments for gagging. Guitars under the earth
as if another
la la inside them the next eight years. Cold choired
blasting
below. Machines as if breaking.
One reckoning an alarming crackling. The late La La with
wheeled
heels through a uke kicked. Deep-sixing in the blazing
core one
whoop on her way out.
an unrequiting.
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