For one thing, the cover is nice. I know this should be an impertinent aside, but I still maintain that if you’re going to have a cover, you may as well make it passable, if not actively good. Here, you get the ocean and an overcast sky, with the title lined up perfectly on the horizon—The History of Anonymity, readable but out of reach. The waves lap up against a blank, black field—an inverse of the book, where lines flag across white space.
Jennifer Chang’s poems make real use of the line, particularly the first of the batch, which is several pages long and shares the title of her collection. The lines are broken and left hanging in the middle of the page so frequently that you can’t help but begin to see them as the phrases they should be. The fragments take on a new emphasis, if not a new meaning, because of the way they are broken, because of what is held together within a line or because of what is withheld altogether: “[…] The eyes/ were gray. Or green, a color/ like a growl. I have/ forgotten.”
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Chang forces her audience to read “like a growl. I have” both as a single phrase, locked in by white space, and in the separate worlds that syntax holds each fragment within. This stereoscopic setup would seem to be one of the truer functions of poetry—bringing disparate things into close contact with each other. The linguistic moves each poems make are quiet but confident.
I first read this back in the fall, when it was still in manuscript form. Thinking back, I could say I liked it, but couldn’t offer a specific reason as to why. I had only a vague remembrance of fiercely faceless characters: Mother, Sister, water. The narrative arc constructed around these characters rewards a straight read-through rather than flipping open to poems at random. Yet The History of Anonymity is much like the waves it contains, washing in and then back out, perhaps because it opens with a sense of something not quite solid (“I had the fog’s countenance”) and closes, similarly, with a sense of reaching. But Chang’s collection is prone to return to mind. It leaves you with a sense of its polish, the sharp observations (“Be silent as the ‘e’ in house”) hidden in the smooth surface of the words, which seem to sit like the title: burned into a mythic landscape, wide as the sea. Even as you read, it both approaches and recedes.
