In Dust and Conscience, Truong Tran uses no commas, dashes, colons, semi-colons, ellipses, quote marks, exclamation points, questions marks, or periods. In 85 pages of poems there is not a single punctuation mark. Each poem is written in a continuous mental breath, with line breaks falling where the rectangular block-shape imposes, rather than by the meters and rhythms that dictate lines in traditional verse.
The result is a perfect vehicle for the subjects of Dust and Conscience: family ties, cultural and sexual identity, and what it is to grow up a hyphenated-american, where one belongs fully to neither the original nor the transplanted home. Tran’s self-contained, prayer-bead-like poems defy the idea that verse must be controlled internally with commas to hobble and colons to bit and blind and periods to rein in. These poems, like a person contained within a set of outwardly imposed boundaries—for example four walls, an ethnicity, or a gender—do not harden and take the shape of their restriction, but instead remain free and fluxing like water; a thing that may take the shape of it’s container, but in its natural state holds no set form.
Ideally, poetic space is the rabbit hole or the looking glass through which we disappear for a time, forgetting that we are separate from what we are reading. It is lost time and place that leads to found time and place. The poetic space of Dust and Conscience explores the timely idea of what it is to live between divided places, times, philosophies, continents, sexes and cultures. It reminds us that sometimes we are not one thing or another but a being experiencing the journey between the two.
Tran achieves this feat not by drowning, pummeling, or alienating the reader with cultural references or trying to create an impossibly detailed picture, but by offering small, potent capsules that gradually stack, tile, and mosaic to form a series of windows through which we glimpse what it is to belong, and alternately what it is to be excluded:
or it will always be this way be it here or there yesterday or tomorrow us or them it
will always be this way you or i…
This is perhaps part of what Tran means when he comments that in his work, the empty space on the page means as much as the space that holds text: that mutual understanding versus uncertainty; home versus alienation; relationship versus isolation, are best understood when both the occupied and the empty are visible at once. Tran allows this duality to be experienced, not just when all the text has been read and the book has been closed—but while the book is still open, while the most recent image is still fresh, where the eyes can’t help but come to rest beyond the text into the place that isn’t the text. But the true beauty in Dust and Conscience is that it offers the reader a surprising discovery: that one is not simply defined by internal or external forces, but by yet another space from which we observe it all—a true home in the self.
Dust and Conscience
by Truong Tran (88 pages/Apogee Press 2002)
reviewed by LJ Moore email: editor.moore(at)gmail.com
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