reviewed on January 22, 2025

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Everything I had seen suggested I would hate the book.

 

Ubiquitous in my Instagram feed, where it had appeared everywhere from Crown Heights coffee shops to Dolores Park, OSSIA had seemed one of those poetry culture causes célèbres the hype around which owed less to the quality of the writing, I had imagined, than to the quantity and cachet of the author’s friends.  The author himself, moreover, had been rendered in the kind of colored line-drawing with which the culture has taken to celebrating its most “luminous”—and demographically appropriate—debut writers, a sure sign, I had thought, of his over-esteem.  Its sideways poems, in turn, seemed to demonstrate nothing more than that Seo, like other young poets enamored of typographical manipulation, had mastered Adobe InDesign.

 

I knew and trusted Changes Press, though, as the most exciting and intellectually ambitious publisher in contemporary poetry, and Louise Glück selects no bad books, and so it was that nearly one year after its release I found myself drawn in to Jimin Seo’s stunning epistolary elegy for his late friend, mentor—and, as OSSIA suggests, lover—poet Richard Howard. 

 

Modeling itself after the colloquy of the pastoral tradition, OSSIA unfolds as a series of letters between the speaker and an imaginary Howard, resurrected in and as language; as Seo puts it, “the language you speak / gone from your body // is my body’s fiction.”  In this way, OSSIA resembles Howard’s own Pulitzer-winning Untitled Subjects, a collection of imagined letters and dramatic monologues from the perspective of nineteenth-century figures such as John Ruskin and Jane Morris, the wife of William Morris.  If Untitled Subjects, published in 1969, challenged a poetry culture in which “most poems being published—our best and our worst—are confessional,” as the New York Times put it, OSSIA likewise challenges a contemporary obsession with and fetishization of identity, a trend which would market certain more or less under-represented experiences for snack-like literary consumption.  “You want me to tell you something about my life,” Seo muses.  “That I was carried to pay off a debt, two hundred / steps up an unremarkable hill. […] Reader, I’ve sold you my story.”  Rather than reveling in the “traumatic” grievances of autobiography, Seo examines with wry and penetrating insight the constitutive role of language in subject formation.  “I am a child of nothing,” he writes in the Lacanian mode, “that is to say / I am a child of books and the voice they sang / into my body, and like a ghost stole my voice / to sing whatever they have to say to you / in my first language, in every language, not for sale […].”

 

It is OSSIA’s investment in subject formation which links the collection’s meditations on literary identity and epistolary elegy.  Seo’s raced and sexualized speaker is no less of a linguistic construct, he suggests, than his re-imagination of Howard, and poetry no more capable of embodying the vast mystery of who we truly are, in all our massiveness and multidimensionality, than it is of resurrecting the dead.  Like the transformative power of imagination in Stevens, in other words, Seo’s “Richard” names a supreme fiction, yet one which nonetheless possesses great emotional force; by the end of OSSIA, as Seo abjures the rough magic of conjuration, he renders Howard’s absence with almost existential despair.  “Richard, I give up my fiction,” he writes.  “[E]veryone I know and you know forgets into a fiction / that anything you will be // is lost unless the flame is counted by everyone we know / but will forget and move on.”

 

The rhetorical immediacy of that passage—or Seo’s ease with statement, with diegesis—finds its counterpoint in the lavish lyric texturing of OSSIA, passages which land just the right side of non-sense:

 

                     Am I all messed up? A Venus of

Migration, let me slant my neck to the half-

lit chandelier and imagine my own family at

the table.  Take to the road humdrum radio

thrum, chimeric limbs slant, hitch a ride, try

my luck at the next town over.  Tomorrow,

find me gone from the lawn: head of fawn,

torso, cherubic dawn.

 

In passages like this, ludic without being withholding, Seo delights in the sprezzatura-like positions that language can take, playing for his readers with delightful abandon.  OSSIA slips too much into non-sense, though, in the crown of American sonnets that make up the book’s final section, where, uncoupled from the interpretive framework of his relationship with Howard, and of his thinking about subject formation, Seo somewhat drops the book’s affective and intellectual through-lines.

 

That slippage into dissociation is a rare misstep in what is otherwise a remarkable debut. 

 

There is not only in OSSIA a profound sounding of the depths of despair—“Why do we wake up in the middle of the night,” Seo asks.  “What friends / will take my calls […]”—but also ambivalent acknowledgement of how memory and cultural tradition work to allay the obliterations of death.  If few young poets can name influences prior to the turn of the twenty-first century, Seo finds both stimulus and solace in those cultural workers who have come before him, including Howard.  In one of the book’s virtuoso epistolaries, Seo imagines the connections among language, identity, and elegy that comprise the book’s intellectual constellation:

 

                                                                  I won’t

remember your name either, my dear friend.

You read me poems: mine and yours warped

into a pain I feel gladly—to remember.

We were translating L’education sentimentale,

and I called it A School for Feelings.  Bach’s

4th French sarabande turned its repeat and

Moreau just betrayed Cécile with a kiss.

A body’s betrayal is better with affection

 I am at last feeling.  School is out.  See you.