Standing Water: Poems

by Eleanor Chai

Overview

A profound literary debut that recounts a child’s singular story

Since I made you, you may

imagine I set myself on fire—
or better, say: you lit the funeral pyre
from ten thousand days away.

A young woman in Paris encounters an uncanny presence on a tour of a small museum. A study by Rodin of the dancer Little Hanako—titled Head of Sorrow—triggers in the young woman recognition of her mother, a mother erased from her life since childhood.

Thus begins Eleanor Chai’s Standing Water, one of the most remarkable first books of poetry in recent years. It is a journey into the past as well as the present—into the narrative hidden from the poet since birth, as well as the strategies that she has adopted to survive. It is a journey about how we learn to cope with, to perceive and describe, the world. It is a story about savage privilege and deprivation.

Haunting the whole is the figure of the real Little Hanako—Rodin’s model, a Japanese artist displaced in Europe, the medium through which other artists dream and discover the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374536862
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/04/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Eleanor Chai lives and works in Westport, Connecticut. She is the coeditor of Efforts of Affection: The Complete Correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. Standing Water is her first collection of poetry.

Editorial Reviews

03/21/2016
In this raw, confessional debut, Chai confronts the specter of an absence—that of her mother, who was committed to a psychiatric facility shortly after Chai’s birth. In the book’s devastating title poem, the poet’s father reveals details of his daughter’s origin and her mother’s postpartum depression, and Chai recalls acts of violence from an older brother angry at their mother’s departure. Chai continually laments her imagination’s inability to bring her mother back: “I thought I could do it: body you forth/ create/make a formal being shapely enough/ to restore you to some life.” She further laments an alienating language gap, having spoken Korean in her early childhood while living with her grandparents before returning to her father and brothers who spoke only English—“the evacuation of my native tongue left me raw.” Ill-equipped to deal with the evidence of her mother’s mental health, she is both attracted to and repulsed by photographs that were “forebodingly strange, then utterly native.” Convictions shift from this unbreachable distance: “Was she actually frightening, or was she scary/ because she was unspeakable, broken,/ fringe and the beginning of me.” Chai finds some measure of peace, and though the void can never be overcome, the struggle unfurls as a beautiful catharsis—haunting, suffocating, and stunningly rendered. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

NPR Best Books of 2016

“Eleanor Chai has a way of controlling cadence and then releasing energy in these poems, tactfully with sensuous care, like someone conducting the slow movement of a symphony. The last poems in the book are outstanding, chiseled and perfect, line by line by line. Standing Water is a great achievement.”
—Colm Toibin

“The many poems of this book are one poem. We are given just enough narrative as we read to articulate a story, just as the book’s central consciousness must find her way through a duplicitous, cruel but not entirely opaque world. We witness the making and breaking and remaking of the narrator’s soul. This book is hypnotically powerful. A first book that is a great book.”
—Frank Bidart

“In this haunting debut collection, through the totemic imagery of art and myth, Eleanor Chai creates a personal mythology of loss and longing rooted in a primal wounding: the separation of mother and child. With startling honesty these poems examine the subsequent wounds of grief and isolation from which something beautiful, like a lotus, can still grow. In Standing Water, a daughter’s quest reflects our human need to know, and how what remains unspoken between a parent and child—all our silences—can leave us torqued in/love: conjoined and struggling.”
—Natasha Trethewey

“I have just finished Standing Water and it is magnificent. Its smothered anger, its accusatory tone, its hurt, all palpable in various registers, creating an energy, finally, that is oddly positive and forgiving in character and that sets its own limits for recovery, dismissal and retention. A masterpiece.”
—Mark Strand

"Chai’s riveting first book, a poem cycle, fuses myth and memoir in a profoundly intricate and pensively elegant response to shocking revelations . . . A brilliantly formed, gracefully devastating poem sequence about the timeless struggle between men and women, the annihilation of innocence, and the alchemy of the self."
—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

"In [Standing Water], Chai confronts the specter of an absence—that of her mother, who was committed to a psychiatric facility shortly after Chai’s birth . . . Chai finds some measure of peace, and though the void can never be overcome, the struggle unfurls as a beautiful catharsis—haunting, suffocating, and stunningly rendered."
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

04/01/2016
A young woman comes face to face with Head of Sorrow, Rodin's study of the dancer Little Hanako, and suddenly recalls the mother who for reasons unknown was expunged from her life at an early age: "Her disaffection stains the intimate/ objects found years later/ among her things of everyday." Soon we are made painfully privy to the cause of this terrible separation of parent and infant child, a separation Chai likens to rape by citing the story of Persephone and the nymph Cyane, who dared to help her: "she rose from her buoying/ comfort to aid a child." Disclosing the shrouded secret in forthright language, Chai also sorts out the consequences. VERDICT Blessed with stately beauty and sorrow even as it explores a key issue, this first book by Pierrepont School founder Chai might feel somewhat telescoped for some readers but signals a strong and specific talent. [See Prepub Alert, 12/7/15.]

Library Journal