Engine Empire by Cathy Park Hong

Engine Empire Reviews

• 
  Nadine Jones

  This is some weird shitThat was my note to myself when I started reading I thought about leaving that as my entire review but that doesn't seem fair It doesn't explain how wonderful this book isIt's common I think when reading a new poet to realize this is unlike anything I've ever read before At least it's common for me Poetry is like that it's so individual and yet it can speak to so many different people The blurb on the book jacket is uite accurate Hong is one of our most startlingly original poets Engine Empire is about Boomtowns And Bob Geldof has got nothing on Cathy Park HongThis isn't the kind of poetry that you can just dip into here and there Well you could but you'd be missing out on the full experience This book needs to be read cover to cover and when you get to the end you may want to start over againWhen it opens you are thrown into a frenetic malarial western goldrush series of ballads Everything is violent and hard You can't uite catch your breathFrom BALLAD OF OUR JIM While we eat up all their salt porkOur Jim sings for them in his strange high voiceof an Injun killing ranger who hitches upwith his Comanche guideShe bears him a strapping son and is rampedwith another when the ranger hives offwith a fair haired sheriff's daughterHe then banishes his suaw and his sonslike they're prairie beevesBut she won't go uietlyshe poisons his new wife with a malarial dressand that ain't the worst of her sins that tar eyed witchstrangles her own newbornand the other son flees The ladies cry enough of this devil songThen it done occurs to us looking at his dusky skin Our Jim's a two bit half breed I don't think I've ever felt the dust and sweat and blood of the Old West so keenly as I did after I finished this thirty page multi poem balladIn part two the boomtown is Shengdu China in which people seem to frenetically hurry hurry hurry but never have enough apartments are built without walls from Adventures in Shangdu Every highrise lacks something Highrise 11 has no heat Highrise 22 lacks floors Highrise 33 has no spigots Highrise 44 lacks windowpanes Highrise 55 lacks stove ranges while Highrise 66 is lopsided Highrise 77 is right across from 88 and it is dark as a tomb It temporarily has no electricity Sometimes I see a flicker of candles roaming flashlights 77 watches us in the sullen dark we with our brazenly exposed units They watch us eat uarrel make love sleep They watch us watching them Lately there have been residents leaping to their deaths out of 88 and spooked 88 residents have been moving to 77 preferring the dark Some residents of 88 have wrapped a weave of laundry twine in a frail attempt to create a rail Someone has chosen to wall herself in with stacked urns I felt like the narrator knew it was hopeless but yet never gave up hope never stopped striving never stopped moving forward even if forward was just in a circlePart three is set in an imagined future living in the clouds if the Internet cloud of data became a real thing The data is snow falling across everyone's world allowing thoughts and data to be real things read by anyone From Engines Within the Throne now we have snow sensorsso you can go spelunkingin anyone's mindlet me borrow your childthoughts it's benign surveillanceI can burrow inside find a cavepool with rock colored flounderand find you half transparentwith depression I think it is fair to say that this book is examining the human cost of progress From the final poem Fable of the Last Untouched Town In this town we are impervious to discomfortsuch as the cold that crackles our blanketand beards the loudspeakers with ice freezingthe monthly bloody rags women dry for the nightWe are strong not afraid to betrayFor instance we rush our oldI wrap my mother in blanketsIt's time now MotherI'm not readyOh but your mind is going your tongueis loosening you will start to talk we planned thisI'm not ready to goMy brother carries her up the mountain of junipersI make a nest for herI dread that we will see other kin abandoned thereI already see her tonguedotted with frostbite yet we leave heras she calls and callsAs we trudge back down our breaths wildwe chant songs of our king
• 
  jasmine sun

  the second set shangdu my artful boomtown was my favorite
• 
  Kiran Bhat

  One of the most fascinating poetry collections to have been written in the last few decades Hong's Engine Empire would be the euivalent of TS Eliot's The Wasteland for our globalized era It is the perfect melange of culture heritage language and history It does what Cloud Atlas did for the novel in poetry form
• 
  Paul Bindel

  I feel alive when I read these poems
• 
  Simeon Berry

  I wouldn't say I enjoyed this book or could even follow many of the moves an individual poem was making but this bafflement alone is worth an extra star
• 
  Jerome Berglund

  Peculiar and engagingIf you enjoy the Dark Tower series check this out
• 
  E.

  I didn't care for this collection A line like the room thrums with zither the thip of pick against rack of strings feels too clever and thus inauthentic I really didn't care for the first section set in the American West during the Civil War I feel as if the work could have benefited with a good study of John Neihardt's Cycle of the West before being writtenThere were these fitting lines in the poem A Wreath of HummingbirdsI am afraid I will infect youafter a virus clogs the gift economybooming etrade of flintlock guns sagStatus updates flip from we are allconnected to we are exilesWhat bullshit
• 
  Nom Chompsky

  we sulk into our loamConstantly engaging language Clear imagery This terrifying roar thru frontier history to industrial horror present to endlessly connected cloud futurity I can't believe how well narrative and voice are married in here How it moves from Cormac McCarthy like deft language into such sincere and provocative reflection that CM hardly ever circles near to This is like what Cloud Atlas could've been like if Cloud Atlas wasn't an awful terrible novel This is so so terrifying It's so hard to believe how good this is This was a gift from a friend and I'm glad I was given it I can't remember the last time I read a book of poetry and didn't immediately think of whom to regift it—this book is mine forever; no one else is allowed it; I want it selfishly to return to as it continues to crackle on my brain like pop rocks for days as it already has following completion of each section of the trilogy
• 
  R. D. Landau

  Engine Empire spans centuries and continents It blurs the boundaries between myth and history poetry and fiction It’s difficult to talk about the poems in Engine Empire separately because so much of their meaning derives from context The poems in the first section “The Battle of Our Jim” form a narrative The sections “Shangdu My Artful Boomtown” and “The World Cloud” build a world through a collection of poems In addition to connections within sections there are connections between sections In the last line of the final poem the narrator swallows some artificial snow containing the internet cloud “And this is what I saw” That line implies that the whole book may be some kind of vision induced by smart snow The interconnected narratives spanning centuries are somewhat reminiscent of Cloud Atlas Hong explores the theme of empire in a surprising way The three settings the wild west modern China and future silicon valley are not what immediately springs to mind when thinking of empire but Hong shows these societies as imperial She finds beauty in the violence of empire “Blood bursts from Earth’s throat in a mighty tornado and speckles itself across the soil hardening to ruby poppies A might empire arises” On my first read I thought that Engine Empire was anti imperialist but now I think it’s a bit nuanced than that Hong’s rebellious characters are nearly as violent as the empires they oppose and she doesn’t make them sound particularly righteous This moral ambiguity was part of what made the first section so brutal it was hard to root for any of the characters The combination of violence and repetitiveness the poems had similar imagery and themes and often the same voice made that section difficult to get through although poems in unusual forms abecedarians and lipograms created a little variety The second section “Shangdu My Artful Boomtown” contains poems set in a fantastical version of present day Shangdu China unsurprisingly given the title These poems are much varied in both content and style and do not tell a single narrative although they all have a fairly similar point of view about the city a sort of futurist present My favorite piece in this section is Adventures in Shangdu a collection of short fabulist pieces in between poetry and flash fiction The final section “The World Cloud” slowly pieces together an imaginary world through poetry As far as I know Hong is the only writer to employ this techniue Her first book Dance Dance Revolution created an imaginary Creole to describe it’s imaginary world In her world “smart snow seeps everywhere the search engine is inside us the world is our display” This future with its constant surveillance its high unemployment and the ability to visually “enhance” reality is just removed enough from our own to feel plausible and frightening “Get Away From It All” is one of the poems in this section that stands alone the best It makes use of alliteration and assonance “did you mean numerous no numinous when minds flood into minds yet one creed molds” The repetitive sounds create a humorous effect as do the line breaks “are they UN forces no they are nudist bathers” These two lines demonstrate one of the poem’s many shifts in tone The persona is both sarcastic about the nudist bathers “they call out like walruses these loafing rebels against the enhanced” and drawn to their old fashioned lives “yet go go into the unknown smell the salt and listen” Engine Empire is filled with nostalgia from this poem to “Fable of The Last Untouched Town” to “Gift” in which the persona’s lover “is the last surviving mannerly hearted archaeologist”
• 
  Dusty Roether

  Unlike anything I've read before I decided to read each part of this trilogy one at a time on three consecutive days The narratives in each successive part is so drastically different that doing this helped me to keep each part both separate and together Honestly the first part Ballad of Our Jim confused me with its western theme Clearly I never watched old western movies The second part Shangdu My Artful Boomtown was really where I got the most from this collection I particularly enjoyed Of the World's Largest Multilevel Parking Garage In the last part The World Cloud I saw shocking parallels between this distant future and our own present in terms of the technology Throughout this collection I felt the tension between the authorities and the common people I might have to read this collection again later to better understand it