Justine Chan’s debut poetry collection, Should You Lose All Reason(s), plumbs placelessness — the anxieties that well up when work distances you from friends, when families leave behind homelands, and when white supremacy lords over once-sacred lands. Chan launches this lyric exploration from the starting point of a Southern Paiute folktale, which, according to the author’s bio, she told nightly as part of her work as a park ranger at Zion National Park. In this tale, the origin story for the coyote, a transfigured human father is doomed to wander the earth while his family looks on from the heavens. The poet addresses the complexity of laying the book’s foundation upon a tale from outside her own culture, writing, “I wonder if I can, if I’m allowed to, talk about the Southern Paiutes. If they will think I am / taking / assuming / speaking for them when I don’t mean to.” While the poet never lands on a concrete answer to this weighty question, the collection is most compelling when it steps out of the past and disregards its self-imposed framework. “What was your life like when you were twenty-eight (or twenty-nine)? What did you worry about?” Chan asks. The poet shows us what twenty-something living looks like in the collection’s strongest passages that meticulously ― yet fluidly ― catalog the people, cities, meals, and songs that populate her geographically vast world.
Should You Lose All Reason(s)
by Justine Chan
108 pages, $19.95
Chin Music Press