Whatever Love Means
“I hold anger like my mother / wedged between shoulder and spine / where wings should have sprouted / but didn’t.” Whatever Love Means is a record of past lives, of people and places, of the ghosts that won't leave. Some parts are memorial, others are made up; all slipstream, still, around a stubborn heart that insists upon an on and on.
In her debut collection, Christine No offers the rare experience of watching a mind mine the body, the psyche, and the interwoven histories of family. These searching poems are equally full of wisdom and unanswerable questions. Brutally honest, tender, and fierce, No’s poems lay bare the pain of personal discovery, the hope of a future free of harm, and the struggle to survive.
Published October 15, 2021
128 pages
By Christine No
PRAISE FOR WHATEVER LOVE MEANS
Whatever Love Means is a searing ode to abandonment. The poems collected here detail a woman’s pursuit of survival despite the psyche’s cruelest intentions. “Woke up still,” Christine No writes, “a woman hell-bent on her own fantastic demise.” Where one is most vulnerable, one is most resilient, and No’s excavation of exactly that erupts amid these pages. Here, “even the dead are dancing.”
- Jeanann Verlee, author of prey, Said the Manic to the Muse, and Racing Hummingbirds
In Whatever Love Means Christine No brings a cinematic lens to the inner life, one that sits in dialogue with its isolation, its traumas, and its grief. And No brings us there with an enduring openness and vulnerability. I was drawn to the way these poems desired to connect, their need to transform—how human this all is, to struggle to change in a world that constantly changes around you, to acknowledge this is a struggle, and to continue to find a place for yourself in spite of, or as No writes, “I still don’t know what I’m doing/ But I am trying/ I am trying to understand/ How I got here…”
—Jason Bayani, author of Locus
Christine No writes places that interest me, delicious puzzles, wonderful questions. I am taken by these diffracted words, these words seen through a prism of individual experience. They express the shatter of the world: "But soft, softer still. twilight. until haze. until downy fuzz, until windowsill.until dust, until sunbeam. because entropy. because eyes." These poems are some of the pieces, some of the rain, some of the days. No has a way of making this language mean things that it wasn't intended to.
- Kim Shuck, 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco
ABOUT CHRISTINE NO
Christine No is a Korean American poet, filmmaker, and daughter of immigrants. She is a Sundance Alum, VONA Fellow, two-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee. She has served as Assistant Features Editor for the Rumpus, as Fellow, then as a Program Coordinator for VONA. Currently, Christine is board member with Quiet Lightning, a Bay Area literary nonprofit and works as the Advocacy Program Manager at ARTogether, an organization committed to using art and storytelling to build and empower newcomer immigrant and refugee communities; and to promote healing, cultural humility, and intercommunity connection. She lives and works in Oakland, California with her dog, Ruthie Wagmore.