Extinction Theory: Poems

In his “National Poetry” series winner, Kundiman Fellow Lam uses direct, urgent, slyly pointed language to burrow into the human condition and the specificities of his own life. A universe begins as “some bloody animal/ inches out of the womb/ …Some deity’s brain/ spills ink all over/ a clean sheet of paper.” Then it’s a matter of “running from your birth, the start gun sounded off,” and for all the many ways we can leap upward, says the poet, “I have never landed/ in the same spot.” As he runs and leaps, Lam closely examines his immigrant childhood (when my father asked me// to translate in English.// He seemed to shrink), the nature of language (“In Vietnam, there is a wet season and a dry season. The word for their differences is assimilation”), the burdens of colonization (“the largest primate in the world/ is the white man’s ego), and his quarrels with God (“I can’t believe in God./ My life is not so insignificant”). If life is “a series of extinctions”—we’re always changing, slipping, dying—his book is a series of theories proposing the various ways we can move forward.