Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon reviews Flow by Luoyang Chen
Flow
Luoyang Chen
Available at Amplify Books
Reviewed by NATALIE DAMJANOVICH-NAPOLEON
Flow is both a verb and a noun, an elusive character and a slippery act of movement, in Luoyang Chen’s beguiling debut collection, Flow (Red River). While Chen tells us in his biography that he is interested in the lyric “I” and the vocative exclamation of “O” in his work, this collection reaches far beyond the concerns of the speaker (“I”) or the audience/addressee (“O”) . The self in Chen’s Flow is both expansive and indefinable, with the collection exploring these aspects in migration, queerness, racism, boundaries of the self and modern love. The poems in Flow remind us that “Love prevails at any place/At any time” (51) while this may sound like an empty aphorism, the complexity of the ideas Chen examines in this collection leads the work beyond cliché. Flow shows us that embracing love is an act of defiance against the forces and systems of xenophobia, homophobia, colonialism and oppressive governments that will attempt to make us hate each other.
Chen’s journey into becoming a poet started in Fujian, China, where they began to explore the work of Chinese contemporary, classical and Misty Poets such as Li Bai, Tao Yuanming, Bei Dao and Gu Cheng (Liminal). Then as an IELTS student they were introduced to classic works of English literature, joining a poetry club at Trinity College in 2016 where they discovered the work of Sylvia Plath among others (Liminal). Chen’s background, rooted in both Chinese and English literature, brings a depth of perception and complexity to their work that few of their Australian peers can touch and is reflected in the body of work in Flow. This collection was produced through Perth’s Centre for Stories successful Hot Desk Fellowship that offers emerging writers a space to write, mentorship and a path to publication through the publisher Red River Press.
The performative nature of this collection is highlighted by Chen’s division of the book into Acts I, II and III, each act opening with a well-curated quote from poets Gu Cheng, Bhanu Kapil and Joy Harjo in turn. Act I opens with a poem about migration, setting up this idea of migration as “flow” or movement throughout, while simultaneously introducing the fictional narrator “Flow” who leads us on our journey into exploring the slippery nature of self and identity. In Act I, Flow scratches the surface of Australian society and reveals the monolingual, monocultural hegemony beneath, leaving little space for languages or cultures other than English. Here there is no space or tolerance for error, yet in “Flow Following Errors” Flow finds a way to endure: “To mistake / Wagga Wagga / with waka waka / is not a crime…Australia is a multicultural country and thus Flow can” (19). Among poems exploring the inexplicable motivations behind racism and hate crimes, including murder, like the list-poem “A Notebook of Flow” (25), the poems in Act I also examine Flow’s philosophical musings, on Wittgenstein, and the possibility he is living in Plato’s cave, “Flow dances with his shadows on the wall” (21). For Flow is elusive, Flow could be “river / stream / smoke of incense / parts from the flame inside the body” (14). As such Act I establishes the course of this narrative that dances and moves from philosophy to socio-political observations to Flow’s examination of the transmutable self.
Act II probes Chen’s experimentation with the “reverse lyric” (Donnison), which rather than expressing the personal “I”, studies the constructed self through a third person character. In Act II Flow begins to delve into physical love, questioning in “Sex Animal” if they are the playful, show off, a “willy wagtail”, or simply a desire driven “sex animal” (40). Yet the specter of otherness arises again in “Museum of Ghosts” when Flow must question their place in Australia, “Flow needs to constantly remember // That he is not Australian / often he forgets” (38). For what is it to be seen as Other, yet not be aware of one’s otherness or ghostliness? Through the character of Flow, the reader begins to see how they are the centre of their own world, and that this othering is placed upon them by outside forces, by the power structures of racism and society. Chen questions these heirarchies and how they bleed into relationships of love and desire, asking “But at night Flow cries and / Mourns for your entitlement and betrayal // Competitors and lovers, / What is this you want?” (38). In Act II we begin to see Flow’s rising self -awareness of being made abject and their inability to stop the surge of this process. “The energy of Flow” is not necessarily soft and gentle as we imagine a slow-flowing river, it can be as “cataclysmic” as a fast-moving flood (15). Migration is as much an act of going with the flow in the new country as it is an act of pure annihilation and then rebuilding of the self.
Although Chen uses spare language in Flow there is a sense that each word has been carefully chosen. Like an expert minimalist painting, the poems in Flow show how less is more; less not necessarily meaning simple as the complexity of topics covered attest. “Cooking Words” is a standout poem that renders the entanglements of the English language for a foreign language learner where “…the content of a sentence is / meaningless, the fluency of a sentence / is stuck in here, in his tongue: rootless, useless; / and still Flow cooks, cooks his words / to articulate this unpresentable eloquence” (39). Cooking is a way to incorporate, distill, and make something edible to share once the ingredients of words are reduced to their essence over time.
In Flow as soon as the reader believes they have this collection worked out the poet deftly alters the course of the text. In Act III the lines between Flow and Luoyang become blurred, with the lyric “I” beginning to bleed into the poems, “Ebbing Wave” being a case in point where “Flows’…identity is rooted in the conspiracy of detritus // a half-lie Flow often tells: Luoyang means the setting sun” (63). Love, the body, messages from a mother and letters to friends and lovers begin to seep into the flow of Act III, where the personal begins to pierce the archetypal skin of Flow. “Letter to Andrew Sutherland” is a particularly touching poem which is an ode to friendship, the power of art and lost love, where Chen writes “I believe one of us is a myth” (58). “Trauma” utilizes the power of space, repetition and enjambment to deconstruct four words “this is / what is”, making a commentary on how trauma intersects and shatters a life. It is in this final act that the collection seems to hit its stride and I wonder if Chen should have dug deeper into the personal throughout to highlight this ebb and flow between the identities of Luoyang and Flow. Yet Flow is overall an immensely satisfying read because we get to partake in the development of the character Flow through each act. This collection explores both how we shape ourselves and how outside forces shape who we become and introduces a fresh new voice to Australian poetry.
Flow’s world is one where nothing is static, even poetry, where everything is movable and unrooted and shifts beyond the binary. It is the world of the immigrant, the lover, the liminal artist striving to find answers yet never settling for simple solutions.
Works Cited
Chen, Luoyang. Flow. Red River. 2023.
Chen, Luoyang. Heartlines [interview]. By Annika Donnison. 2024 https://centreforstories.com/stories/heartlines/luoyang-chen/
Chen, Luoyang. 5 Questions with Luoyang Chen [interview]. By Liminal Magazine. 2024.
https://www.liminalmag.com/5-questions/luoyang-chen