A confession: There is nothing I dislike more than not understanding something. 

Last April for National Poetry Month, I took on Terrance Hayes’ Lighthead. I hadn’t had any exposure to poetry since I’d left college and found myself floundering within the first few pages of the collection. Sticky notes were everywhere. Too many tabs were open on my phone’s browser. At the end of the month, I pulled together a reflection of my experience but still felt flummoxed. After all my research into the different forms and referential language, I didn’t seem to be closer to understanding poetry at all. 

It was with some apprehension that I began compiling the recommendations I’d received for poetry collections this year. I didn’t want to give up– exposing ourselves to new ideas and formats is half the fun of having a book club– but I was afraid to pick another book of poetry that would leave me banging my head against the wall in frustration. I wanted to “get” poetry. Figure out what I’ve been missing. That’s when I came across one recommendation that stuck with me, one I thought might be my gateway into understanding poetic form.

Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of is the author’s poetry debut. The collection revolves around her brother, lost to suicide, and the family photos he cut himself out of before his death. Throughout the book, Nguyen mixes poetry and imagery to create a multi-layered story of grief and the holes, both literal and figurative, people leave when they’re gone. It’s a stunning award-winning collection that plays with the poetic form and its connection to the visual arts, which is the very reason I selected it as the next poetry entry for the book club.

While I may not have a full grasp of poetry, I do have a competent understanding of the visual arts. With a little help from Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook and the knowledge I gained over four years of art school, Ghost Of gave me the push I needed to finally glean a basic understanding and appreciation for poetry.

The first pieces of the puzzle were the line breaks. Line breaks are essential in poetry– where a line ends, how many words are in each line, and where the line is physically printed on the page, all play into the way our minds and mouths read the poem. How the lines stop and start can act as rhythm, with short lines forcing us to read faster and long, drawn-out lines slowing us down. Nguyen’s poems in Ghost Of play with this concept in two parts: one part as intended in the traditional poetic sense and the other as part of a visual narrative. This dual approach is most obvious in the “Triptych” and “Gyotaku” series, where she plays with the visual idea of positive and negative space.

Take the “Triptych”’ series’ use of negative space. Each triptych, or sequence of three images, features one of the photographs Nguyen’s brother cut himself out of. The following two poems are built first into the negative space, where her brother has removed himself, and then into the positive space of the photograph left around him. The result is that the negative space poem, condensed into a small, isolated area on the page, has line breaks in the middle of words, making the poem short and difficult to read. The positive space, on the other hand, practically takes up the page it’s printed on. With stream-of-consciousness-like writing, the run-on sentences of the positive-space poem are broken up by the line breaks that create the hole her brother has left, leading to our brain stuttering or faltering amid the prose. The ghost of her brother’s absence, as indicated by these line breaks and the negative spaces they create, haunts each triptych both visually and in its reading. 

In contrast, the “Gyotaku” series plays heavily with positive space. Using the same shapes and photographs, Nguyen references the Japanese printing process of gyotaku. Theorized to have started as a way to record fishermen’s catches, gyotaku uses actual fish as a kind of stamp, laying ink over a sea creature’s scales or skin and pressing the inked surface against paper to create an imprint. Since its inception, gyotaku has evolved past singular fish and into hyper-realistic portraits of ocean scenes using a wide range of ink colors and mediums. In the same way a gyotaku artist may lay ink on a fish, Nguyen lays words in the shape of her brother’s missing photograph pieces. She then lays those words down, sometimes on their own, sometimes creating dynamic visuals in long eel-like shapes or schools of fish. These positive imprints build on each other, the words layered or fading, sometimes obscuring them altogether. One can imagine the author laying down each imprint like a stamp as if to capture her brother’s shape and essence after he’s already gone. 

Once I’d grasped the general feel of the book through the visual cues, I was able to focus instead of Nguyen’s talent for diction. Her clever use of mixing the word “elver”, a word for a baby eel, with her brother’s name, Oliver, led to several of the poems and the use of gyotaku clicking into place. The word choice and punctuation she selects create an atmosphere over each poem, with long lists of punchy bureaucratic ID forms in “I Keep Getting Things Wrong” acting as a shout, while her slow, meandering prose in “Family Ties” takes a more philosophical tone. To get a feel for the way she pieced together each piece, I read the poems out loud to an empty room, finding the cadence (or lack of) in each, feeling how the word choice and structure created an emotion. For the first time while reading poetry, I found it made sense. I was able to turn my analytical brain off and just listen to the sounds the words made and how they were impacted by the format and subject matter, without sitting there trying to dissect every line or phrase. It was an enlightening moment.

My poetry epiphany didn’t make Ghost Of a less daunting task. Instead of being overwhelmed by form and function like I was with Lighthead, the collection was mostly difficult due to the subject matter. Traversing the empty plains of mourning doesn’t make for light reading. Still, the author pulled off an incredible accomplishment, successfully taking the reader on a journey through the highs, lows, and confusing in-betweens of grief through the combined use of language and visual art. While I don’t know if I can recommend this as freely as I do many other books– the subject matter can be a lot for some folks– I will say that this may be the first collection of poetry I’ve been able to understand. Maybe not fully; I don’t think anyone but the poet can grasp every nuance of a poem. But for once, after years of attempts, I was able to sit with a book of poetry in the same way that I’ve learned to sit with art. For that, Ghost Of has my eternal praise. 

I hope you’ll join me again for next month’s book, yet another departure from traditional novels and writing, Tillie Walden’s graphic novel On a Sunbeam. Until then, happy reading and happy sipping!