Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: A Bestiary
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://english.nmsu.edu/lily-hoang/ * http://lesfigues.com/author/lily-hoang/ * http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-pathos-of-ephemera-a-review-of-a-bestiary-by-lily-hoang/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2007119505
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2007119505
HEADING: Hoang, Lily K.
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100 1_ |a Hoang, Lily K.
670 __ |a Intersections, 2006: |b t.p. (Lily K. Hoang)
670 __ |a Parabola, c2008: |b t.p. (Lily Hoang) cover p. 4 (debut novel)
670 __ |a 30 under 30, 2011: |b ECIP t.p. (Lily Hoang) data view (b. Mar. 26, 1981 in San Antonio, Texas; first book, Parabola; currently assistant professor of English at New Mexico State Univ.)
953 __ |b rg03
PERSONAL
Married.
EDUCATION:Notre Dame, M.F.A. (prose writing), 2006.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Fiction and nonfiction writer, editor, and educator. New Mexico State University, director of the M.F.A. program; Puerto del Sol, editor; Jaded Ibis Press, editor, Starcherone Books, associate editor; Tarpaulin Sky, editor.
AWARDS:PEN Beyond Margins Award, 2009, for Changing; Cleveland State University Essay Collection Competition winner, 2015, for A Bestiary.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short fiction to literary journals, including Hobart Pulp, PEN/America, Make magazine, Black Warrior Review, Action Yes, Fairy Tale Review, Quarter After Eight, and Marginalia.
SIDELIGHTS
Vietnamese American author Lily K. Hoang writes experimental fiction and essays. She is interested in narrative in its many guises, such as traditional short story, essay, and conceptual experimentation. She is director of the M.F.A. program at New Mexico State University and has served as editor for numerous small presses, including Puerto del Sol, Jaded Ibis Press, Starcherone Books, and Tarpaulin Sky. Hoang’s 2008 book Parabola combines coming-of-age observations with mathematical formulas, photographs, numerology, dark matter, and psychology.
In 2008, Hoang published the novella Changing, which borrows its structure from the I-Ching. The fairy tale story features Little Girl in a mysterious, topsy-turvy journey toward fortune and destined change. Hoang focuses on history, identity, Little Girl’s past, the sense of finding a home, and sadness. Changing received the 2009 PEN Beyond Margins Award. In 2012, Hoang asked authors to send her their unfinished short stories, and she finished them for her experimental book Unfinished: Stories Finished.
The 2014 book The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on Accessibility and the Avant-Garde is a two-volume anthology Hoang coedited with Joshua Marie Wilkinson. For the collection, nearly one hundred writers explore the meaning of the avant-garde, the experimental, and accessibility in literary fiction, often presenting works that are contradictory. The writers attack various answers to the questions of avant-garde, literary, and political possibilities in contemporary twenty-first century fiction. Contributors include Eileen Myles, Lyn Hejinian, Joyelle McSweeney, Blake Butler, and Jenny Boully.
Hoang teamed with coeditor Blake Butler, editor of the literary journal Lamination Colony, to publish the 2011 anthology 30 Under 30: An Anthology of Innovative Fiction by Younger Writers, which collects thirty short fiction stories from writers under the age of thirty. Written in various styles and with innovations in story structure and plot, the stories delve into topics of technology, video games, teenage anxiety about sex, horror, and a retelling of the Robin Hood story. Writers, who come from the fields of fiction, editing, and academics, include Shane Jones (“Light Boxes”), Matt Bell (“How They Were Found”), Joshua Cohen (“Witz”), and Kathleen Rooney (“Live Nude Girl”).
Hoang published the 2010 experimental novel The Evolutionary Revolution. Here she considers a different evolutionary path for man and for woman. Her story asks questions of man as a subspecies, men and women as different subspecies from each other, women with wings on their legs, the earth without a salt ocean, and fantastical creatures like mermen. Asked by Zachary Doss online at BWR about the blend of strangeness and familiarity in her writing, Hoang responded: “I’ve really focused on world building. Because most of my writing occurs in a magical landscape, the world building is even more essential. I try to explain to my students that when writing magic, you have to ground the reader in elements of reality, ways for the reader to relate to and empathize with.”
In the 2016 essay collection A Bestiary, Hoang explores the power of myth by adapting the Chinese zodiac of animals to a postcolonial Vietnamese world complete with rats, packs of dogs, and insects. Her writing transcends genre and expands the definition of literature to include improvisation, performance, fragmentation, rejection of a narrative arc, and experiments in language. Focusing on her family and heritage, she delves into feminine subjugation, addiction, memory, friendship, divorce, and body image. According to Annalia S. Linnan in Ploughshares: “Winding, whimsical, and wild, A Bestiary tackles race, womanhood, and memory with a precision that pinches right at the veins.” A writer in Publishers Weekly observed: “In Hoang’s mutinous cosmos, time warps and dilates to link ruptures between games and reality, the living and the dead.” Nicole Roché declared in Cutbank: “Bestiary does not pretend to offer answers. Rather, it invites readers to step back from the chaos of a life, to see it for what it is.” A Bestiary received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s 2015 Essay Collection Competition.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, May 16, 2016, review of A Bestiary, p. 31.
ONLINE
Brown University, https://www.brown.edu/ (March 1, 2017), author profile.
BWR, http://bwr.ua.edu/ (June 16, 2014), Zachary Doss, “Contest: An Interview with Fiction Judge Lily Hoang,” author interview.
Cutbank, http://www.cutbankonline.org/ (November 26, 2016), Nicole Roché, review of A Bestiary.
Get Lit, http://getlitfestival.org/ (January 5, 2016), “Lily Hoang: The Experimental Writer and Magic.”
Heavy Feather Review, https://heavyfeatherreview.com/ (May 25, 2016), review of A Bestiary.
New Mexico State University Web site, https://english.nmsu.edu/ (August 5, 2014), J. England, author profile.
Ploughshares, http://blog.pshares.org/ (June 24, 2016), Annalia S. Linnan, review of A Bestiary.
Small Press Book Review, http://thesmallpressbookreview.blogspot.com/ (April 2016), review of A Bestiary.
Small Press Distribution Web site, http://www.spdbooks.org/ (March 1, 2017), author profile.
Lily Hoang
By jengland | Published August 5, 2014
photo_lily hoangBiographical Statement:
Lily Hoang is the author of five books, including A Bestiary (winner of the inaugural Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Nonfiction Contest) and Changing (recipient of a PEN Open Books Award). With Joshua Marie Wilkinson, she edited the anthology The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on Accessibility and the Avant-Garde. She is Director of the MFA program at New Mexico State University. She serves as Editor at Puerto del Sol and for Jaded Ibis Press.
Teaching Statement:
I cannot teach students how to write a good story, because “goodness” as an aesthetic is constantly evolving, but my goal in teaching in the MFA program is to introduce students to new forms of fiction while grounding them in the canon and preparing them for the challenges that will come with being an active member of the writing community. My classes use literature as the nexus to explore broader questions about art, writing, and the development of aesthetics.
Courses Recently Taught:
ENGL 349: The Short Story
ENGL 413/513: Advanced Creative Writing, Fiction
ENGL 449: Online Publishing
ENGL 534: Form and Technique of Fiction
ENGL 574: Graduate Workshop
Research and Creative Interests:
Hoang is interested in narrative in its many guises, whether it is a traditional short story or conceptual experimentation. Although her books have been labeled as “experimental” or “avant-garde,” what she loves are narratives, the ways in which a story can happen and influence the reader. She is active in small press publishing and Internet writing communities.
Selected Publications:
Books
The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on Accessibility and the Avant-Garde, co-edited with Joshua Marie Wilkinson (Night Boat Books, 2015)
A Bestiary (winner of the inaugural Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Non-Fiction Book Contest, 2016)
Unfinished (Jaded Ibis Books, 2011)
The Evolutionary Revolution (Les Figues Press, 2010)
Changing (Fairy Tale Review Press, 2008)
Parabola (Chiasmus Press, 2008)
Anthologies
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Contemporary Fairy Tales (Penguin, 2011)
Haunted Legends (TOR Books, 2011, this story was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Prize)
Best of the Web 2011 (Dzanc Books, 2011)
The &Now Awards: Best Innovative Writing (&Now Books, Lake Forest College, 2009)
Not Normal, Illinois (University of Indiana Press, 2009).
Journals (short fiction)
Hobart Pulp
PEN/America
Make Magazine
Black Warrior Review
Action Yes
Fairy Tale Review
Quarter After Eight
Marginalia
Author: Lily Hoang
Lily Hoang's books include A BESTIARY (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2016), THE EVOLUTIONARY REVOLUTION (Les Figues, 2010), and CHANGING (Fairy Tale Review Press, 2008), recipient of a PEN Open Books Award. She has two novels forthcoming: Old Cat Lady and The Book of Martha and she co-edited the anthology THE FORCE OF WHAT'S POSSIBLE: WRITERS ON ACCESSIBILITY AND THE AVANT-GARDE (Nightboat Books, 2015). She teaches in the MFA program at New Mexico State University, where she is Associate Department Head. She serves as Prose Editor at Puerto del Sol and Non-Fiction Editor at Drunken Boat.
Lily Hoang is the author of four books: Unfinished, The Evolutionary Revolution, Changing (recipient of a PEN Beyond Margins Award), and Parabola (winner of the 2006 Chiasmus Press Un-Doing the Novel Contest). With Blake Butler, she co-edited the anthology 30 Under 30, and she is currently co-editing a two volume anthology, The Force of What's Possible: Essays of Accessibility and the Avant-Garde with Joshua Marie Wilkinson. She serves as Prose Editor at Puerto del Sol, Associate Editor at Starcherone Books, and Editor at Tarpaulin Sky. She teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at New Mexico State University and can be found virtually at the literary blog HTML Giant.
2014 Contest: An Interview with Fiction Judge Lily Hoang
Jun 16, 2014 | Archive, Interviews
Lily Hoang is the author of four books, including Changing, recipient of a PEN Open Books Award. Her choose-your-own adventure love story is forthcoming with 1913 Press. With Blake Butler, she edited 30 Under 30, and with Joshua Marie Wilkinson, she edited The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on the Avant-Garde and Accessibility. She teaches in the MFA program at New Mexico State University, where she is Prose Editor of Puerto del Sol. She is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell College.
Interview by ZACHARY DOSS
Black Warrior Review: You currently teach at the New Mexico State University. How do you like living in New Mexico?
Lily Hoang: New Mexico is the Land of Enchantment, and every day, I am further enchanted. It is a fairy tale landscape, only bare of trees. At night, I walk from my house to the Rio Grande, a ten mile round trip. I walk along an arroyo, which is an arroyo in my mind only, it is really a ditch, as my friend Richard Greenfield reminds me often. But, but: doesn’t arroyo sound more romantic? An arroyo, I walk along an enchanted arroyo.
BWR: What impact do you feel like teaching has had on your writing?
LH: To be completely honest, my writing has become much more conservative because of teaching. As I teach, I learn more about the “craft” of fiction, which I had learned in MFA school but actively rebelled against. Now that I have to teach it, craft fails my writing, or, succeeds me, or, it secedes me. I just finished a domestic realist novel, which I blame on teaching, although, although, it was a challenge, something I’d never done before, and now that I’ve done it, I’m eager to get back to magic, swoon.
BWR: I’ve noticed that your books, while similar in some ways, are really very different in terms of form and content; you’re an extremely versatile writer. Do you start each project intending to take on a new style, or do you find that it just happens?
LH: Most of my books are OuLiPian games. I tend to let the form dictate the content, which is why my books are so varied, so unfamiliar—especially to me. I start with the formal game, and then I enter with the sentence, one first and then the next. I guess the commonality among my books is that they’re all syntactically questionable.
BWR: How do you think social media, or the internet in general, has affected your life as a writer (if at all)? Do you think the internet has had much impact on us as writers generally, other than the fact that I can now Tweet at Stephen King?
LH: Years ago, I was in Houston for a reading and I hung out with fellow HTML Gianters Gene Morgan and Ryan Call and Gene said that we’re all the Internet generation of writers and there’s some real wisdom to that. Or: maybe wisdom isn’t the right word. It’s just—look at the trend in very short fiction and it seems impossible that social media has had no influence on form, consciously or not.
BWR: You recently tweeted this: “Most ppl would say I misuse the comma. I say you just haven’t maximized the comma, its magic superheroic power.” I was excited to see someone else who was enthused about the comma. What mileage do you get out of the comma in your writing? What are your thoughts on the magical power of the comma?
LH: I have the word parataxis tattooed to my chest, it’s my favorite poetic device. Some people would call this a comma splice, others might call it a run-on sentence, but to me, it’s parataxis. I am working on a non-fiction book with Bhanu Kapil on punctuation, desire, and the post-colonial body. The magical power of the comma is its ability simultaneously to connect, to separate, to fuse and infuse.
BWR: I’ve seen your work referred to as “experimental,” and when I hear that I’m always unsure of what it means. Do you consider yourself experimental, and if so, what does that mean to you?
LH: When I was younger, I was determined to be “experimental.” I didn’t quite know what “experimental” meant, but I was sure my work followed in that tradition—the irony! Today, I’m not so sure what experimental means. For instance, Ben Marcus’s work. He’s been criticized for his turn to the traditional, but I think his newer work is even more “experimental,” it challenges in its recognizability.
I guess now more than ever, I have no idea what “experimental” means. I’m constantly questioning its definition and its intention. That being said, I have a cat named Gertrude (after Stein, obv), and I just edited an anthology with Joshua Marie Wilkinson called The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on the Avant-Garde and Accessibility, where close to 100 writers explore the very meaning of “avant-garde” and “experimental” and “accessibility,” among other things. I’m often typecast as “experimental,” and I’ve worked to cultivate it, or, a younger me at least. And most of my writing friends—ahem: virtual friends—are also typecast as experimental, whether they accept the role or not. So, sure, I’m experimental, whatever that word means anymore.
BWR: In her introduction to The Evolutionary Revolution, Anna Joy Springer notes that it takes place in “A place familiar-yet-strange.” This seems to be true of a lot of your writing. What is it about this blend of strangeness and familiarity that appeals to you?
LH: I went to this master class—if I dare make the musical equivalent—with Susan Steinberg, who said that the only necessary elements to fiction are place and conflict. That happened years ago, but the idea has stuck with me. Since I heard her explain this idea, I’ve really focused on world building. Because most of my writing occurs in a magical landscape, the world building is even more essential. I try to explain to my students that when writing magic, you have to ground the reader in elements of reality, ways for the reader to relate to and empathize with.
BWR: What are you working on right now?
LH: I recently finished my domestic realist novel and I’m currently working on two collaborative books: with Bhanu Kapil, a book on punctuation, and with Carmen Gimenez Smith, a verse novel called Hummeltopia. Otherwise, I am turning ideas about a fairy tale trilogy, which is nascent, barely burgeoning.
BWR: I’m not going to ask you what your favorite book is, because that’s always really hard question to answer. But what have you read recently (or you know, in your life) that really stands out in your mind?
LH: Every word of Selah Saterstrom’s the Beau Repose trilogy. Every single word.
But to be honest, I read a lot more theory and philosophy than fiction. Recently, I have been obsessed with Lauren Berlant’s work.
BWR: What are the things you’re going to be looking for in a contest winner? Or, what really excites you when you read it in a piece of fiction?
LH: I’m really excited by works of fiction that are conceptually driven—and let us all shift up from fourth to fifth gear with the sentence.
BWR: Do you have any non-writing hobbies? What do you do when you’re not working?
When I am home, my idea of fun is inviting my friend Carmen Gimenez Smith over and we work on our laptops and periodically laugh together. Otherwise, I enjoy what other people do: cooking, knitting, walking. Let us resurrect the flaneur, and this time, let the term include women, yeah?
Lily Hoang: The Experimental Writer and Magic
by Get Lit Staff | Jan 5, 2016 | Visiting Writers | 0 comments
lily-hoang“I try to explain to my students that when writing magic, you have to ground the reader in elements of reality, ways for the reader to relate to and empathize with.” -Lily Hoang
Lily Hoang is a writer of experimental fiction. She has described her books as “Oulipian games,” named after Oulipo, a French literary movement that used constrained writing techniques. Her work continually subverts readers’ structural expectations.
Hoang’s first book, Parabola, weaves together photographs, mathematical formulas, and interactive IQ, personality, and psychological tests. It won the Chiasmus Press Un-Doing the Novel Contest. Her second book, Changing, borrows its structure from the I-Ching, and won the 2009 PEN/Beyond Margins Award.
Since receiving her MFA in prose writing from Notre Dame in 2006, Hoang has spent time teaching at writing programs around the country, an experience which she says has drastically changed her approach to fiction: “To be completely honest, my writing has become much more conservative because of teaching. As I teach, I learn more about the ‘craft’ of fiction, which I had learned in MFA school but actively rebelled against. Now that I have to teach it, craft fails my writing, or, succeeds me, or, it secedes me.” [2014 interview, Black Warrior Review]. As one might guess from her word choice, Hoang hasn’t completely lost her taste for experimentation. Though she has recently completed a “domestic realist novel,” she’s now “eager to get back to magic, soon.” [2014 BWR].
Hoang currently teaches at New Mexico State University’s MFA program. She enjoys knitting, cooking, and going on long walks through the deserts surrounding Las Cruces. She has said she plans to work on a trilogy of fairy tale novels, but no word yet on how those are going.
She comes to Spokane Friday January 22nd at 7:30 to Aunties Bookstore as part of GetLit! and Inland Northwest Center for Writers Visiting Writers Series.
Hoang tweets, entertainingly, under the handle @camerainsecura, and years’ worth of her archived posts for the legendary, now defunct blog HTMLGIANT are available here.
A Bestiary
Publishers Weekly.
263.20 (May 16, 2016): p31.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* A Bestiary
Lily Hoang. Cleveland State Poetry Center, $16 trade paper (156p) ISBN 978-0-9963167-4-3
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In this genre-transcending work, selected by Wayne Koestenbaum as the winner of the 2015 Cleveland State University Poetry Center's Essay
Collection, Hoang (Unfinished) relentlessly teases apart mythology, familial memory, and investigative essay into searing fragments, then weaves
them into a dazzling swarm. Hoang models her postcolonial bestiary on the Chinese zodiac---"A pack of dogs. A swarm of insects. A mischief of
rats./ You desire the human equivalent"--and uses it to represent such concepts as fidelity, beauty, and "the disgust of desire. " In doing so, she
confronts such topics as feminine subjection, familial suffering due to assimilation ('"Vietnamese women suffer better than all other people,' my
mother used to tell me"), and a sister's addiction and death with a precision that is by turns vulnerable and justly incensed. Hoang subverts the
moralizing tendencies of folklore to form a new hybrid mythology that, like all belief systems, reassures the believer--and the reader--that human
vulnerability is undergirded by a sense of mutual care. "In order to join the collective, you must un-become, lose your face and skin, eject your
2/5/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486355926239 2/2
identity," she writes. "This is called belonging." In Hoang's mutinous cosmos, time warps and dilates to link ruptures between games and reality,
the living and the dead, pain internalized and sickness expressed. This collection is both ravishing and ravished. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"A Bestiary." Publishers Weekly, 16 May 2016, p. 31. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453506746&it=r&asid=e522fffb8a17d340f466c8e6009b9f6d. Accessed 5 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A453506746
CUTBANK REVIEWS: "A Bestiary" by Lily Hoang
November 26, 2016
A Bestiary by Lily Hoang (2016)
Review by Nicole Roché, Online Managing Editor
From its opening line, A Bestiary interrogates and subverts myth. “Once upon a time—,” author Lily Hoang writes, “shh, shh—this is only a fairy tale.” From there readers are thrust into Hoang’s world, a world both deeply personal and achingly universal.
The acclaimed collection, which won Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s 2015 Essay Collection Competition, reads like pastiche, collage, glimpse memory. Its form follows in the tradition of works by Jenny Offill, Mary Robison, and David Markson, works which play with fragmentation and white space while eschewing a traditional narrative arc. Hoang’s contribution to the form comes via the power of nonfiction, the resounding, undeniable ring of truth—of Hoang’s truth.
Throughout A Bestiary, various motifs are interwoven, both in individual sections and throughout the work as a whole. Loss, friendship, divorce, body image, ambition, the writer’s life, assimilation—it is the culmination of these motifs, and the nuances of meaning they accumulate, that gives the collection its power. The white space separating each section invites readers to consider the connections between them, the invisible thread that completes the web of not just Hoang’s experiences, but those of us all.
Hoang draws on myths from Ovid to Vietnamese folklore to Hans Christian Anderson. At times she refers to herself as the Little Match Girl standing outside her own life, salivating over “all that is not [hers].” Elsewhere, she creates an alternate mythology through a character she calls Other Lily. This alter-ego lives life perfectly, altruistically, and above all in accordance with her parents’ wishes. Hoang writes, “Other Lily doesn’t fail at marriages, and her husband is Vietnamese. He respects her too.” Yet this is one fairy tale Hoang rejects outright, stating, “Face the facts: There is no Other Lily, and I’m pretty satisfied with my life.”
Toward the end of this stunning collection, Hoang admits, “I have tangled the fairy tales I write with my life.” What is the purpose of myth if not to trace, to explain, to validate? Like the best of literary nonfiction, A Bestiary does not pretend to offer answers. Rather, it invites readers to step back from the chaos of a life, to see it for what it is, and to stand in awe rather than despair.
Review: A BESTIARY by Lily Hoang
Author: Guest Reviewer |
Jun
24
2016
Posted In Book Reviews, Nonfiction
bestiary_hoang
A Bestiary
Lily Hoang
Cleveland State University Poetry Center, April 2016
156 pp; $16
Buy: paperback
Reviewed by Annalia S. Linnan
Not all rat mazes have corridors. For the Morris water navigation task, it is as it reads: a rat must learn to fare in water. It is placed inside a pool and must swim to the other side. Once the rat learns its path, the scientist adds a solution to the water, causing it to become opaque. The hypothesis is that the rat will be confused. However, “despite changes to the environment, rats swim right to the platform.”
Lily Hoang is a first generation Vietnamese-American. A Bestiary, her debut collection of essays, is not about rat experiments, though they appear in some cases (as the above garnered from “On The Rat Race”). In meditations comparable to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Hoang both approaches and avoids her sister’s death (drug overdose), her failed marriage (white man she calls Chris), and a destructive on-again, off-again relationship (white man she calls Harold).
She has made attempts, like the rat, to find her way back home, but the paths didn’t lead the way they promised. “I had wanted to be a good wife, and for the most part, I was,” she writes, “but the fact that my marriage was a catastrophe doesn’t change.” As for Harold, he is a stubby lighthouse with broken lamps and both of them know it, but she remains. In “On Scale,” she does the math: “The weight of my love measured against the weight of my life without him measured against his betrayal and all the terrible things he’s told me over the years. In the end, no matter my options, I know I will choose Harold.”
Suffering, she tell us, is a virtue in Vietnamese culture. It is right and true and noble, a thing required of all women. Hoang points at jade bracelets, describes how when she was young “my mother would cuddle me closely when I was sick. She would say, ‘Shhh, shhh,’ and tell me that she wanted me to give her all of my sickness, so that she would be sick and I wouldn’t.” This inherited anguish—the pain and pleasure it inspires—seems to be a birthright, one that clashes with Hoang’s ideology as a feminist.
In “On Catastrophe,” she introduces us to Other Lily: “She would succeed in all the ways I have failed. She would not be a professor. She would not be divorced. She would be a good daughter.” Other Lily is a medical doctor, does not have “bad skin” or “a head full of white hair” or “do something as shameful as smoke cigarettes.” Other Lily “saves two lives and loses none”; Other Lily “is in love. And all her loyalty and love is reciprocated, an equal distribution of desire and faith.” Other Lily is perfect, the embodiment of our “better” self, the one we have always been told we should strive to become.
Actual Lily is feral and flighty, ferocious in her inner life. However, she also writes, and not without effort, “Face the facts: there is no Other Lily, and I’m pretty satisfied with my life.” Here, she stresses an essential point: she is not an either/or but a both/and. Winding, whimsical, and wild, A Bestiary tackles race, womanhood, and memory with a precision that pinches right at the veins.
Lily Hoang’s A BESTIARY
Heavy FeatherMay 25, 2016book reviews, nonfictionPost navigation
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A Bestiary, by Lily Hoang. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland State University Poetry Center. 156 pages. $16.00, paper.
When it comes to writing, Asian women in America are given two choices. The first, of course, is the one where her exoticism oozes from her skin like bark slathered in sap, where she is delicate like dishes that only see food during holidays. She is an Asian woman with Asian parents who adore her and they have made a life possible only through this bootstrap-raising that the Puritans wrote about in their diaries. The second—also damning—is the one where she is angry, wild. In this narrative, her lack of decency begets what she deserves: no marriage, no children, no medals.
Lily Hoang knows these expectations when she pens the essays that comprise A Bestiary. To introduce the collection, she writes, “Once upon a time—shh, shh—this is only a fairy tale.” In the first essay, “On the Rat Race,” the princess appears, and it is not her. It is Hoang’s dead sister, who is never named, not once—in this essay, or any of the others. Instead, Hoang writes:
My sister died nearly three years ago.
I have stopped asking why before once upon a time began.
I have renamed her my dead sister.
If there is love beneath this pragmatism, confusion, and frustration, it is affection Hoang keeps close. For us, she displays her dead sister’s troubles—ones, it seems, her parents have difficulty recognizing. Later in the essay, the mother praises Hoang’s dead sister for using the meat carver on Christmas and Thanksgiving. “She’s the only one who’s ever used it,” Hoang reports her mother saying, “She was so talented!”
However, it is a mere meat cleaver, and Hoang’s sister was only in San Antonio for a few years, had only borrowed said cleaver a few times, before she died. Hoang also adds no adornment to her sister’s addiction: “Towards the end, my dead sister stopped discriminating: any opiate would do, anything to subside her pain.” Here, Hoang recognizes that her sister’s hurt could not be contained—not by drugs, not by her, nor the lover and two sons she left behind. The night before she finds “my dead sister seizing on her bedroom floor, before she went and died,” Hoang describes how she “heard her crawling along the carpet,” opening bags and zippers. This whole time, “I didn’t open my eyes.”
Pretend, make-believe, fantasy—shh, shh—is a theme throughout. “On Scale,” the final essay in the collection, is especially brutal, a litany of cruelties inflicted by Hoang’s ex-husband Chris, her lover Harold, and how she always stayed. “The weight of my love measured against the weight of my life without him measured against his betrayal and the terrible things he’s told me over the years,” Hoang writes. “In the end, no matter my options, I know I will choose Harold.” In other words, it’s not that she doesn’t know. She knows. She just can’t escape it. “My selflessness is a flaw I inherited from my mother,” she writes. “I suffer very well; my altruism can leave bruises.”
Some essays read as vignettes or parables while others dare even the most free-form lyric essays. “On the Geography of Friendship” with its movements (i.e., “Fugue” and “Allegro Non Troppo”) unfolds like a suite; “On Measurement” is an ode to Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” Main characters—her dead sister, ex-husband Chris, lover Harold, and close friend Dorothy—appear often, in the way the same actors play all of Wes Anderson’s characters in his films.
With A Bestiary, Hoang takes the illusion of the Asian woman we all recognize—meticulous, string player, passive—and skewers her, without pity. In this fairy tale, Hoang is a “bad feminist” and her sister is the Sleeping Beauty. Vibrating with energy but never maudlin, Hoang repels, and dazzles—an amazing debut.
Beautiful Behavioral Sink: Review of Lily Hoang’s A Bestiary
A Bestiary
Lily Hoang. CSU Poetry Center, $16 paperback (156p) ISBN: 9780996316743
In “The Animal Mode of Inescapable Shock,” Anne Boyer writes, “If an animal is shocked, escapably or inescapably, she will manifest deep reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her. If she has manifested deep reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her, she will manifest deeper reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her and then dragged her off the electrified grid. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for electrified grids. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for what is not the electrified grid. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for dragging. She may also develop deep feelings of attachment for science, laboratories, experimentation, electricity, and informative forms of torture.”
In her book-length collection of essays, A Bestiary, Lily Hoang explores this complicated relationship between abuse, attachment, affection, and autonomy. Juxtaposing fragments of the author’s personal life and other ephemera, Lily Hoang weaves together images of rats, tigers, fairy tales, a dead sister, Asian/Orientalism, time, an abusive ex-husband (a self-described anarchist who demands alimony), myth, memory, an occasionally lying, occasionally cheating lover, family etched onto the body, feminism, teaching, an addicted nephew, violence, compulsion, and one night of hedonistic pleasure with an old school friend. This structure, like Tender Points by Amy Berkowitz or The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, works best when the fragments speak to each to create a whole, something larger than the sum of its parts. Hoang’s A Bestiary accomplishes this through both subtle and clever means.
The book is broken up into sections, each a loose thematic collection: on the Rat Race, on Catastrophe, on Measurement, on the Geography of Friendship. Some sections sprawl across fifteen, twenty pages, allowing the fragments to speak to each other in surprising ways:
Before I found her seizing on the floor of her bedroom, before she died, I watched my sister polish off a ninety-count bottle of Hydros. She gave her son Justin some, but the rest she ate as if garnished with the finest sea salt. She doesn’t die of overdose, but she dies.
My doctor ups my dosage of Xanax. There are too many things I can’t think about.
***
Dionysus is the god of epiphany, the god who comes.
***
The only time Harold kisses me the way Jacob does was after rough anal sex. “I feel like I just raped you,” he said afterwards.
Other sections are shorter, like the tight, controlled section entitled on Violence:
on Violence
Once, my father's friend, the Skinny Man, brought over a dead goat. He had hit it with his mini-van. My father helped him bring it in because it was too heavy for one man to carry alone, but they sent me to my room first. I had never seen a goat before—not up close—but I didn't argue. I didn't fight. I was just a kid then, still sleeping with my mother even though I was too old for that. I played house with marbles; they rolled and sat and drank tea out of tiny plastic cups.
Later, the men will drink beer and eat stewed goat.
Later, when I am taking a bath, the Skinny Man will come in and wash his hands, and I will watch how lathering makes bubbles and how quickly the water washes it all away. I will not look at his eyes in the mirror's reflection. The marbles will be slick with soap.
As the book’s title suggests, there is no shortage of beasts in this book, both animal and human. The humans in this book treat each other badly and then try, sometimes, to do better. They struggle against addiction and their own asshattery; they feel the pull of family like thread sewn just beneath skin. They drive 500 miles to visit their lover who lies. They themselves lie. They burrow into friendships, into teaching, into fairy tale and myth. And alongside the humans, the beasts roam, both symbol and salve. Rats run mazes and press levers, tigers haunt villages, goats are both feast and sacrifice, rabbits perform cunning tricks, and in the Great Race, the pig always, always finishes last. (April 2016)