WALKING THROUGH A DESTROYED CITY: On Jackie Wang’s The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void

By Clarissa Jones

Nightboat Books, 2021, 131 pages, $16.95

Reading Jackie Wang’s debut poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void is akin to reading a stranger’s dream journal, full of all the troubled visions of the unconscious mind. Wang weaves familiar things from her waking world, people she knows, popular music, leftist theory, with threads from the unsettled state of dreams: anxiety boarding on paranoia, settings and characters that shift mid poem, and an overarching sense of unreality. Within that dreamscape, many poems within the collection seem to become nightmares, or at least disquieting dreams. Many of these poems explore problems of voyeurism: of watching and being watched, and the fear of watching and being watched. These voyeuristic feelings and fears become a thread the reader can follow throughout the book’s dream logic. The result is a collection that reads like a journey through a dreamscape, at times disorienting, at times unsettling—but which ends on a surprising note of triumph and hope.

Wang has certain maximalist tendencies that lend themselves well to the subject of dreams. The form of her poems speak to this fuzzy boundary between dream and reality as much as the subject matter does. Certain poems could be read either as prose blocks or as single stanza poems with long, but deliberately placed, lines. Her poems often shift form, from prose blocks, to single double-spaced lines, to short center-justified lines, and then back again. These form shifts mirror the subject shifts in the poems, which in turn mirror the shift in subjects in dreams.

One example is in “Death as a Survival Technique,” where the poem suddenly shifts from dense prose blocks to single line stanzas:

In the distance I hear Maxine eulogize me. He knows I’m not dead

but to stop people from killing me he must convince them I have

died. Feigning death makes me privy to how I will be remembered. I

think, How sad that people are not alive to experience their funerals

because it’s the most love they’ll ever get. Maxine memorializes people

in a way that only a queer who has lived through the AIDS crisis can.


Ah but I’m alive!


The threat of death calms me.

These shifts are sudden, often displacing the audience in time and space, and yet still clearly operate on some sort of internal logic. In the above example, the shift in form appears to signify a shift from scene to thought, though in others it is the opposite. The poems are not written in an established form, and yet they often seem to operate formally on their own terms. Each poem is like an individual dreamscape, operating on its own dream logic, within the larger dream and larger logic of the collection as a whole.

Certain poems, most notably “The Evil Noodle,” “The Chase,” and “The Sewer Rat Counter-Haunts The Prison By Nesting In Society’s Collapsing Aorta” create an atmosphere of dread and paranoia and transform that into, depending on the poem, commentary on family relationships, the prison industrial complex, intra-community political disagreements—among other seemingly disconnected ideas that nonetheless come together to make a cohesive, if dreamlike, whole. Never is that more obvious than in “Instead of Thickening My Skin I Buy A Neon Balaclava.” The poem follows a sort of narrative, in which the speaker, who may or may not be Wang—the “I” and the “you” of the poems are often deliberately confused throughout the collection—comes into conflict with a critic of a play that, as the opening line states, “incites violence against me.” The poem turns into an exploration of art, obsession, and voyeurism, culminating in the lines:

What I enjoy about being hated the way the interviewer hates me is that

he is, in a sense, my only witness.

What I don’t enjoy about being seen the way the interviewer sees me is

that there’s nowhere to hide.

I pull a hot pink balaclava over my head to interrupt the event of

recognition.

The idea of being seen, hated, and recognized all working in tandem is a central tension of the collection as whole. The dual emotions of the desire to be seen and the fear of being seen permeate the dreamscape Wang has created. The act of watching and being watched is never far from the speaker’s, or the reader’s, consciousness. This sense of performance does not undermine the sense of intimacy the collection creates through its dream-journal-like nature, but rather heightens it. The reader feels more kinship with the watched than the watchers, despite participating in said watching.

The collection’s implicating, unstable use of “I” and “you” enhance its exploration of voyeurism. One early poem, “The Evil Noodle,” sets the stage with the lines:

But who am I?

Anonymous observer. No one sees me.

This primes the reader to expect shifting identities within the collection as well as problems of witness and voyeurism. These shifting identities are occasionally even literal, such as in “An Inventory of Scenes from Oneirogenic Herb Dreams,” in which a recurring character within the poems literally transforms into another person. The unstable nature of identity in the collection as a whole, as well as in individual poems, heightens the disorienting and dreamlike state while commenting on topics such as personal perceptions of identity and troubled relationships. This disorientation then turns the inherent voyeurism present throughout the collection in on itself. As the speaker confuses “I” and “you,” watched and watcher, the poem creates a sense of self-perpetuating surveillance—that all the paranoia in the nightmare sequences is part of a never-ending vicious cycle, watching begets watching, alienation begets alienation.

Despite this recurring theme of fear and alienation, Wang also weaves in a sense of hope and wonder, particularly through her use of the image of the coral tree. This image is mentioned in several poems throughout the collection and expanded upon in the book’s latter half. It first appears in the poem “The Coral Tree,” where it is established as a symbol of hope in destruction with the lines:

…That’s where I was walking

through a destroyed city. But…the luminous tree!

This idea of hope in a time of hopelessness permeates the collection as much as fear and surveillance do, especially in the latter half of the book. The title poem is the final poem and arguably the most hopeful of the entire collection. When Wang leaves us, it is with the words:

I remember waiting, flinging seeds into a faux-

terracotta trough, then transferring my seedlings to the plant bed outside

the window

and waiting for the green spire to beget young Helios—a child who

lives to witness the miracle of anything that grows

These words of hope cut through all the fear and disorientation that came before, offering the tree as a solid image to anchor us in reality after a journey through the dreamscape. And in the end, a journey is exactly what The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void is. Wang takes her readers through a landscape of fear, love, paranoia, and confusion, ultimately reaching a destination of hope. Wang sets out to disorient, then brings the puzzle pieces back together in a way that helps the reader see the collection, and the world itself, in another light.