Engine Empire

Hong's poetry engine generates imagined worlds that weirdly parallel the ones we know. The book (her third, after Dance Dance Revolution) has three parts, each set in a different milieu: a rollicking Wild West that mildly resembles California à la Michael Ondaatje's Billy the Kid; Shangdu, a prototype boomtown; and a cloud-based future in which one can recall "the antique ringtones of singing/ wrens, babbling babies, and ballad medleys…." If Shangdu recalls Coleridge's Xanadu or lime tree bower ("Shangdu, my artful boomtown!" is the section's title), it is also the scene of rampant, dehumanizing development, where Highrise Apartment 88 is erected so hurriedly that one whole wall is omitted. Throughout, even the words sound invented: telenovela, thip, harmine—but they're not. But Webster's won't get you too far in these regions, where people live to be 150 and cowboys scat sing, "I'm a natty cross-dressing/ wrestler in possum/ chaps, my boots can smash/ any clapboard slat…." The middle and final sections of this triptych are stronger than the first, where sound gets the better of sense, but much of this book is deliciously inventive.