An Ouroboros, A Ceiling Crack, A Celestial Scale: A Review of Anna Maria Hong’s Fablesque

One of my first writing instructors told an early workshop of mine that every time he read a particularly good story or novel, his first thought was damn, I should’ve thought of that first. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel that same sense of envy sometimes, as I wade through and untangle the genius, generous, boundary-pushing work of my peers and idols alike. Sometimes it’s impossible not to watch some brilliance unfold on a page in front of me and wish I had used some part of it in my own work. Other times I’m driven to pick up the pen myself and start falling down my own lines of inquiry, branching away from the inspiring material I’ve just read.

My experience reading Anna Maria Hong’s Fablesque, winner of the prestigious 2017 Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry, was entirely different, starting with the first lines of the first poem of the book. Immediately, upon turning through its first few pages, I recognized Fablesque as a cunning, yet untamable beast, a protean pinnacle of hybridity, courage, and wit, a text, I believe, that could only come from the mind of Hong, its creator. To me, this is the highest form of poetry, when a poet’s found a voice so uniquely their own that the power it wields seems as if it could shatter whole worlds only to bind them back together with song.

I would not hope to imitate or even try to replicate what Hong has done in Fablesque, how she balances lived experiences with the reclaiming of myth, how she moves so effortlessly from the high lyric to the narrative, to the historical, to the autobiographical. And, while it’s true that hybrid texts have been in vogue for the past few years or so now, I’ve never seen a book use its hybridity quite so deftly, so seamlessly as it’s used in Fablesque. 

But Fablesque has tied itself more closely to folklore and storytelling than it has to hybridity; while many of the poems in the collection don’t directly blur genre, the majority of them engage with folklore, whether the speakers orients themselves within these poems by aligning with starving wolves, diving through the history of windows and fish ladders, or retelling sometimes familiar stories with a biting newness. 

Fablesque hits the ground running with “Heliconius Melpomene,” named after the postman butterfly, which is remarkable for its ability to evolve rapidly, having become the subject of extensive study on speciation and hybridization in butterflies. “Heliconius Melpomene” starts with a fractured high lyric: “Not the branch but the dismantling. If// I could have seen the shape of it,// I wouldn’t have made the journey,” the speaker recalls before pouncing from image to image, landing on “venom in a bloodstream.” The next lines make a quick turn toward remembering the speaker’s father’s escape from North Korean soldiers at the beginning of the Korean War with the detached narration and high stakes of a fairytale: the father’s two companions, we’re told, are shot in the head, but the speaker’s father survives through an act of cunning.  The poem bobs and weaves again, turning to the perspective of the speaker at thirteen: “My middle-aged father’s smooth, blankly animated face telling the parable of his own cunning and lack of disabling empathy.”

Fablesque works this way as a whole, flitting between subject to subject, speaking the language of the unspeakable by bending folklore to the speaker’s needs to confront the Korean diaspora and beyond. These poems see things as they are, not as we’ve been fooled by the legends of our forefathers to believe that they are. I’m particularly struck by the language in the prose poem “Wolf: “The wolf was entrapped by its cravings—not for the Woodcutter with whom she has no quarrel or interest but for the Woodcutter’s beasts; his chickens, hit goats, his sheep, the animals of restive living” before continuing “But the Wolf is not picky. If the Woodcutter had kept monkeys, cockatiels, or Schnauzers, the Wolf would have pursued them too” later on. Not only do we see a desperate wolf caught in a trap, but we feel her hunger, her cravings. We see ourselves in her voracious thirst.

This, I believe, is where Fablesque succeeds most: bending folklore and convention to reimagine trauma, to recontextualize real-world suffering into fable and breathe life into the world of fairytale so that it, too, can speak to living in the world today. 

Poems like “Siren,” which give voice to an often-maligned creature like the siren, also strike me as particularly interesting.  The first few lines are spellbinding:

“When they turned me into a bird, they

turned me into a woman,

my top half full of breasts and throat,

the bottom all claw and dirty venom.”

Not only does this poem bring sympathy to the siren (which is traditionally known for luring sailors out to sea with their song only to devour them after they drown), but it gives us her origin, her twisted body, her dirge of fate. Later lines bring humor and sympathy into the present day:

“Goals for a Monday:

—rip out the knees of the patriarchy

—practice histrionic but alluring singing

—do laundry”

And while I can’t help but find humor in the “do laundry” note at the end, the other two goals strike me as human while also doubling down on that the idea of the siren comes from a historical, patriarchal demonizing of women and their sexualities. 

Many dramatic moments of Fablesque are also informed by the parataxic hybridity created by placing certain poems side-by-side, as in, say the abrupt, high lyric of “Kronos” with the fairytale-like “Snow Goose” and the more narrative “Blue Morpho.”  Fablesque is a collection full of tension, but it’s a tension that fuels innovation and encourages exploration for speaker and reader alike.

Some poems, like “Patisserie du Monde” are playful; some, like “HK Rules the Planet,” are puzzling; and others, still, are full of linguistic joy, as in “Amphisbaena: “The amphisbaena has no natural predators, being/ unnatural. Lust overlaps chastity,// bronze scales on a sealed ring.” Other poems interrogate ceiling cracks, basement wall cracks, wandering chambers, stairwells, and any number of spaces between. 

After all, the work in Fablesque capitalizes on the greatest power of myth: It isn’t real, but it speaks to reality. Fables aren’t true, but they speak to truth, and, in doing so, they create a liminal space for brilliant poets like Anna Maria Hong to reclaim myth from its patriarchal past and appropriate it for their own ends. Each time I read Fablesque, I find new moments of wonder, new amusements in this carnival of language to comfort me and discomfort me, to intrigue and unsettle. 

At face value, a poem like “Nude Palette” might read as frivolous with its opening line of “What a muse, what a mess, this state of undress,” though it quickly turns our attention to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 with its continuing lines of “descending the spiral stare—to look back is/ to profess, resume the harness, and lose/ the myth of progress.” These lines, along with the rest of the poem, are enchanting, but they also have something very real to say about the treatment and placement of women in modernity and other parts of the contemporary landscape. 

Fablesque is full of what an old mentor of mine would call “poetic fun,” but it’s also full of depth, intrigue, and commentary about the worlds around us, both real and imagined. As one might expect, there’s more wonder and more cunning in even a fraction of Fablesque than I could ever dream of including in this review, but I consider myself lucky for having had the chance to explore its geographies and dreamscapes, its intrepid spirit, its fearless takes on vicious beasts, astral bodies, and ancient gods alike. Any reader who gives themself the chance to fall in love with Hong’s work will find themselves grateful the same way.