Barrelhouse Reviews: Every Single Bird Rising by Xiaoly Li

Reviewed by Elizabeth Sylvia

FutureCycle Press / April 2023 / 92 pp

This would be a remembrance, / But I was already bewildered: In her nimble translation of Li Shangyin, the epigraph of debut poet Xiaoly Li’s collection Every Single Bird Rising gestures towards her book’s defining theme: the confusing tangle of memory. Here, memory is both personal and communal. The four sections of the collection cross time and space, braiding together the difficult experiences of surviving China’s Communist Revolution, immigrating to America, and losing loved ones to death or distance. The poems respond to such sorrows by celebrating love and friendship and the persistent beauty in ordinary nature.

Even in the book’s first section, “Much Unsaid,” which most directly addresses experiences of the Revolution and its aftermath, poems celebrate connections formed in hardship. Here, the speaker and her mother both becomes voices of memory. In “Reeducation,” a communal “we” captures and shares a meal of cat: “Dozens of us, / a few bites each.” In another poem, when one girl falls behind planting rice, “We all help her until the moon watches.” Love comes in a moment of relief from the Revolution’s punishment. The speaker’s mother is a beacon, a star, for her imprisoned father: “Every day on that porch across from the prison / he saw the girl with short hair and bangs /waving and smiling at him.”

As the title of the section, “Much Unsaid,” suggests, Li’s poems crystalize moments of memory from a swirl of painful history. Ever-present threats of hunger and betrayal haunt the edges, but family and shared struggle lie at their centers. The speaker’s father even holds compassion for her mother’s betrayer, saying only “Her friend did what she had to do.”

A similar reticence suffuses what may be the central agony of the book: the speaker’s leaving behind of her young daughter when she comes to America (first as a student and then permanently). Though her daughter eventually immigrates to America as well, the speaker remains regretful about the “many long nights / She missed my lullaby.” A certain distance, never directly acknowledged, seems to live on between them, though the speaker wishes to bridge it, calling out:

After many years
I am still your mother,
Will you meet me through
the tangled spirals? To reach you,
I’ll crawl back to the center.

As in earlier sections, the speaker chooses love, open-heartedness, and connection. In the final poem, she confesses, “I hope of being a grandmother soon,” and the reader can’t help rooting for her to celebrate one more beginning, one more loving connection.

The hopefulness of that wish is poignant, too, because both age and Covid cast a darkness across the speaker’s peace. She navigates the pandemic wondering “Is every moment the second to the last?” Poems in the second and third sections of the book memorialize lost friends from youth through late age. Reflections on pandemic isolation underscore the loneliness that arises from those deaths.

Li threads these spare and readable poems with images of nature that counteract the pain of forced and voluntary separations. From the dragonfly to the Covid moon the speaker longs to touch with her “sanitized hands,” nature appears in poem after poem as a respite, a quiet place to reflect or disconnect from the difficulties of the moment. And nature inspires: the opening poem’s wild geese defy and escape Mao’s reign, while the Mandarin duck of the speaker’s first day in America boldly cuts through the “staring” crowds as the speaker wishes she might.

In these poems, Xiaoly Li finds over and over what endures, from the darkness of traumatic history to the bonds of love—brought to life over Zoom calls—as well as the everlasting rebirth of nature. She closes her collection heading out to “see the cygnets on their first worldly day.”

Elizabeth Sylvia is the author of None But Witches: Poems on Shakespeare’s Women, winner of the 2021 3 Mile Harbor Press Book Prize and a Small Press Distribution bestseller. She has been a semi- or finalist in competitions sponsored by DIAGRAM, 30 West, and Wolfson Press and has been published in over 30 different literary magazines. She is a reader for SWWIM Every Day. elizabethsylviapoet.net