Reviewed by Jim Johnstone

The first time I saw Souvankham Thammavongsa perform on stage, I strained to hear her speak. Diminutive in stature, with a quiet, measured voice, she recited poems repurposed from a scrapbook that her father compiled in a Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, in 1978, the year she was born. Despite the poor PA system, I was impressed by Thammavongsa's command—she read slowly, clearly, and confidently—letting sparse sentences build into emotional palimpsests. It was obvious that the work was more than the sum of its parts, and that this was a writer whose poems were grounded in lived experience. A short time later, the Canadian funding body BravoFACT agreed, and sponsored a TIFF-bound, five-minute film of Thammavongsa reading many of the same poems. Set to family photos and home movies, the film remixes short lyrics into a powerful narrative read aloud in the poet's own voice.

Thammavongsa has built a career out of an affinity for small things: words, poems, books. It's there in the title of her first collection, Small Arguments (2003), and it's there in the monosyllabic names of her next two: Found (2007) and Light(2013). Shaped to suit the unusual line lengths and preponderance of negative space in her work, these books were printed by Pedlar Press, a Newfoundland-based publisher known for their attention to detail. Indeed, detail is what Thammavongsa brings to bear in her best poems, particularly those about family: take the image of a young girl reading newspapers used to dry boots when her parents didn't own books ("Materials"), or the way her father's pen sounded while leaving its mark in his notebooks ("My Father's Handwriting"), and you'll see the precision and empirical rigour that makes Thammavongsa's poetry distinct even among the most observant practitioners. Add intricate lineation, used to make every word on a page count, and you have a writer with a knack for creating compact epiphanies.

So it's striking that the first thing that stands out about Thammavongsa's new book is its heft—at 104 pages, it's by far the most sustained collection of poetry she's produced. Published by McClelland & Stewart, Cluster amounts to a major label debut, a large-scale production after years of independent releases. And it is large, in both scope and structure, expanding the poet's palette to add overt political elements to her patented minimalism. "The story they told us was wide and lost and ever changing" she writes in the title poem, and this quickly becomes Cluster's mission statement. Poems about ordnance in Laos stand next to domestic narratives and brokerage reports, and while Thammavongsa doesn't abandon her interest in the building blocks of language—the next line in "Custer" is "And the words it came with were small"—she often broadens her perspective to imbue her poems with multiple levels of meaning. 

In this sense, much of Cluster has the feel of photographer making use of a telephoto lens. In "Minute Maid Poster" Thammavongsa shows the reader a row of orange groves printed on a juice advertisement before zooming in to focus on the poster's fine print. The world shrinks when she writes: 

From far away, the blue in the sky and the green

on the ground looked uniform. Up close

they were made of a million little dots. The blue

was made of blue, but the green was of bits

of blue and yellow arranged on top of each other. 

The yellow came first and then the blue. It was

the distant looking that brought them together,

that filled the space between them.

Like many poems in the book, "Minute Maid Poster" is rooted in dislocation. Here, the poster in question hangs on the wall in order to afford the protagonist's family "a different view / than the one we had from our window," a conscious attempt at imagining a better life. But what is an imagined life when it's broken into base elements, in this case the colors that have been used to print the poster? This question interrupts the illusion of the advertised image, and when Thammavongsa pulls back again, the poster becomes a field where the "future look[ed] in on us, but we didn't see." By placing her characters in the image itself, the poet cleverly ratchets up the emotional intensity of the poem by subverting the better life that the Minute Maid poster promised earlier. 

Ostensibly, "Minute Maid Poster" is about the refugee experience of Thammavongsa's childhood, and in this sense it's of a kind with many of the poems in her earlier books. Found, particularly, explores this territory, using memory as an anchor to offset text taken from the poet's father's scrapbook. When asked about writing from memory in a 2014 interview with Shoshannah Ganz, Thammavongsa answered:

I write a lot about family. Those are the people who form you, who give you your first word, who are the ones who share your language at the very beginning, who are there at the very beginning. All of my writing comes from memory. Something I saw and wanted to tell someone about, or something I saw but didn't know how to describe until twenty years later. In some ways, I do think a lot about the child I was. I do feel I am always writing to her, telling her about the things that are here in the world and to not be afraid. 

Memory, or more specifically the way memory shapes identity, is the focus of a stunning series of poems ("My Mother Gave Me," "Picture of Us," "There Are No Photographs of Me," "Another Picture of Us") scattered throughout Cluster. Using photography as an anchor, Thammavongsa contrasts childhood emotion with visuals that often don't match experience. In "My Mother Gave Me," the poet's protagonist flips through a family photo album and discovers that the brother she always assumed had been her parents' favourite is wearing her old clothes. Her future self is witness to the way "even the haircut [her brother] has is mine," reconfiguring her impressions of a childhood spent feeling that her brother was "the one / [my parents] really wanted."

These poems feel personal, as one would expect. But the real accomplishment in Cluster is that the book's political moments feel personal as well. This is exemplified by instances where Thammavongsa's once short poems have been stretched out, without sacrificing emotional power for length. The most prodigious example is "O," a fifteen-page long poem that serves as the book's centerpiece. Beginning as a meditation on the letter 'o,' the poem skilfully morphs into an account of the secret war waged by the US on Laos in the 1970s (while US forces publicly invaded neighbouring Vietnam). This is accomplished through a series of associative leaps, illustrated by Thammavongsa's description of 'o' as:

Sometimes . . . a number signifying nothing


Until it's an investment return


"Any other figure followed by o pushes its value higher

It is a mark of temperature 

A degree to balance the consequence of liquid shapes

In just five lines, the poet moves through the mathematical implications of the number 0 before it becomes a mark of temperature, and then an indicator of the temperature at which matter will change states. Like stones skipping across a lake, Thammavongsa's words pursue her thoughts, and by the time she notes that 'o' is "the shape of a tennis ball," the poem has bounced into a physical manifestation of her imagination. 

Soon, the images in "O" shift into something more sinister as they assume the form of cluster bombs that can blow off an "arm or leg." The impact of erupting ordnance is the overriding metaphor for the book, and can be seen both formally (where lines are spaced apart as if they've been detonated) and in the fractured diction that parallels the devastation in Laos. The Guardian has referred to the millions of leftover bombs in Laos as its new "cash crop," since collecting scrap metal is one of the most lucrative practises in the region. Tragically, many of the bombs that are collected are live munitions, and over 13,000 people have been killed or injured to date. Thammavongsa, who was born in the Lao refugee camp mentioned earlier, references the article directly: 

But this new cash crop

More than forty years ago, it had been planted

Designed and seeded to clear the trail

"There are no American combat forces in Laos"

You don't have to declare a war for there to be one

These words, and the words that ensue about the 2018 Laos dam collapse (that displaced another 6,600 people), are poignant reminders that many wars don't end with armistice. As "O" proceeds, it's evident that Thammavongsa's family providence is attached to outcomes that North Americans only read about in newspapers, and she emphasises this when she reminds the reader that "The experts on Laos / Are those who live there." Using a kind of legerdemain that only the best poetry produces, Thammavongsa breathes new life into an ongoing conflict where "The cleaning up that need[s] to be done" has been left for those who were ravaged by the war in the first place. 

With mushrooming ambition there's often a learning curve, and if Cluster has a weakness, it's that there are times when it's too expansive. In "Blowfish," Thammavongsa goes on a page too long, settling for anticlimax instead of ending on the bottle of Chanel No. 5 that's used to spray the titular fish to mask the smell of rot. When the poet writes that "We lost the shape of who we were" in relation to the dried blowfish's own deflation, it makes explicit the metaphor that had subtly (and expertly) guided the poem to that point. The collection-closing "Mister Snuffleupagus," too, plays most of its cards before a heavy-handed finish. Using the people who inhabit Sesame Street costumes as a canny metaphor for invisibility, the poem is a vivid take on inequality and betrayal before over-explaining its premise in lines like "I want to say what I never got to say / That I was there / That it was me / That it was mine" and "I was there when it all happened / At the beginning."

But these are minor concerns. They're also fundamental parts of the style Thammavongsa cultivates in Cluster, and her new approach is a welcome progression. Late in the book, Thammavongsa states that "We learn to add / Before we learn how to take away, to lose." This is an exemplar of her evolution, prising what went unseen in her previous work, but building on it in a way that simultaneously defies expectation. If anything, Thammavongsa's career path is the inverse of what one would expect, as she's only now stretching her sentences and syntax to continue "To hold open the possibility" of language. Cluster holds open this possibility while holding its own as a testament to how the small can be writ large, marking Thammavongsa as a poet who listens and deserves to be listened to.