Kim Sa-inLiking in Silence

In Québec’s “county of ***,” a widow’s life might be predictable, “set like tracks in the snow.” Or not: “She picked up the knife, set it down again. Picked it up. Set it down.” Here, a love story has rat poison, a rope, a one-eyed cat, and more widows than brides. Renée LePine, not widowed but single, works at Spencer House, monitoring the eponymous baths where one husband died. A simple task—daily, at midnight—but not: she drops weight, suffers insomnia, and her desperation increases. Characters slip between action and apathy, sadness and goodness, delirium and dreams, and acting and lying. At first glance, Fortier’s communities fit within the Québécois literary tradition: bustling and populated with colorful characters as in Roger Lemelin’s and Gabrielle Roy’s novels, with the spellbinding dreamscape of Anne Hébert and the quotidian grit of Marie-Claire Blais, but there’s a present-day gaze toward agency and violence . A scenic structure accentuates plot elements: the extorted become blackmailers , a performer returns from the stage of the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique on Boulevard du Crime in the “Old World,” and a widow serially solicits four widowers. Actions intersect, so one woman’s romantic liaison creates a draft that moves the spiderweb above another woman’s bed. As in Fortier’s debut, The Unknown Huntsman (2014), a gun appears in a pivotal scene—there in a church basement, here in a child’s hands. Neither weaponholder ’s motivation is accessible, but here a related character’s memories, which “tinged her wishes a more vivid and more bloody shade,” contain clues. Wit and irony dilute the bloodshed. Characters have surnames like Pilgrim, Webb, Beurre, and Roux. There’s also an abundance of archetypal curiosities: spiders and spells and soups; puddles and bottles and pebbles; sleepwalkers and double lives and sarcophagi. The story circles around two questions: What makes a heart beat faster? What makes a heart stop beating? Actually, three. What happens when these questions share a single response? Readers beware: the tub in the honeymoon suite of Fortier’s The Electric Baths isn’t heart-shaped but coffin-shaped. Marcie McCauley Toronto Kim Sa-in Liking in Silence Trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé & Susan Hwang. Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2019. 120 pages. IN THE PREFACE to Liking in Silence, eminent Korean poet Kim Sa-in tells his readers that “[growing] up through an era of developmentalism and authoritarianism” has caused his poems to take up positions of “compassion and sympathy.” Indeed, texts in this book are suffused with water cannons and homelessness, old lovers, temples , death, grief, and drunkenness. These are capacious works taking in minuscule details of the everyday’s casual and causal contexts. When noticing a little toe poking through a sock, the poet sees “a million years of human history”; when watching a butterfly, Kim wonders “[h]ow far on earth / are you going.” When “a prematurely dead leaf drops stealthily,” he exclaims, “Thanks! / Really, this is something to be grateful for.” These poems are attuned to the existential , and Kim speaks as if reflexively from a position of profound humility. The poet casts a gently vigilant gaze across the dramas around him (both human and otherwise), watching as “good days drift away, like a lost scarlet hairpin . . . Before we know it, dust settles on every windowpane and everything blurs.” Within these inevitabilities, he announces a clear role for poetry: “I have no intention of blaming anyone after all this time. / We are beginning to resemble the thing / we have long been dreaming of together in harmony.” The tones in Liking in Silence are alertly calm, and this book watches multitudes intersect, minutiae endlessly explored for implication. A “tiny weed stands in [his] way,” and in the next poem, Kim seems so bewildered by mundane beauty that he wonders whether the fragrance of an acacia tree “come[s] from a distant star.” When not opening onto such interconnections , the poems seem to yearn toward it (in “harvested fields / flocks of birds are WORLDLIT.ORG 103 indifferent”), and, on the next page, the poet wants to know to “whom shall I speak...

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