Beast at Every Threshold
Natalie Wee
Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022
Review by Stella Cali
Natalie Wee’s Beast at Every Threshold explores queerness, identity, and diaspora. Through formal experimentation and controlled vulnerability, Wee has created a collection that feels simultaneously challenging and welcoming.
Scattered throughout this collection are jewels of formal experimentation; in “Self-Portrait as Beast Index,” we follow crossword clues to mythical creatures. For example, the answer to the clue “how each cry, barely audible, escapes the insect that made it,” is “BANSHEE”—while the answer to “yes, we are woodwind whittled through with life” is “DRAGON.” The clues, which when read together form two complete stanzas, tie family history to powerful and complicated creatures; the crossword itself becomes a fabric of identity woven through with myth. “Self-Portrait as Monster Dating Sim,” structured as a flow chart, is a magical speed date conversation. “How long have you been around?” asks the first voice. “Long enough to split the first echo,” answers the second. This formal departure is a tangible interaction between identity, pop culture, and folklore. Wee’s self-portraits are at their most experimental, drawing on myth and cultural history, which wind vine-like around the scaffolding of modern forms. Wee’s experimental forms are compellingly interactive in nature, forcing the reader to work, to move their eyes across the page in unusual ways and participate in piecing the self together.
Wee’s collection explores the body as a site of violence, and the intergenerational nature of trauma. “Every sentence I start about a man who hurts me ends / with the sentence about the men who hurt my grandmother,” the speaker says in “An Abridged History.” “It will never be over because it was told in the softest / part of her bones, passed through the velvet marrow / that lies within my body.” We hear the heartbeat of the speaker’s grandmother in each of these poems—even when she isn’t present, her story is part of the fabric, her experience threaded alongside the speaker’s. In “Phoning Home to Tell My Grandmother I Survived a Hate Crime,” these two voices are in direct conversation, spliced by distance, the block of text cut through physically with slashes: “my love I know / all that distance / & my name through it / is the sound of / breathing in reverse / the audacity of being here / the audacity of being / here.”
Across these poems, the body transmutates—from wound to cage to home. Celebrations of queer love and queer bodies dance through this collection: in “Because “San Junipero” Said the Queer Bar is a Marriage Hall,” the queer club is a “haven,” a space held for the reclamation of sensuality: “we still have bodies to call our own / & what a word ours nectar-sweet and next to oh.”
There is a warm humour at the heart of this collection, rooted in a sense of found family. While reflecting on the intimacy of meme-sharing in “Inside Joke,” Wee’s speaker explores the condensed layers of meaning that develop as jokes and memes are repeated and altered between friends. Private references become treasures—a language of love that only lovers understand. “Understanding memes is a kind of alchemy imho,” the speaker states. “My bb sends a pic of 2 otters + the word “us” / translated: we exist in every iteration of touch made possible.” Wee manages to pinpoint something difficult to nail down—love expressed through repetition and self-reference; language made flexible, made personal, through play.
Wee is a poet who is unafraid to play while holding onto complex legacies of loss and joy. A rich connection between past and present, this collection is an intimate examination of identity and all its facets.
Stella Cali is a queer writer and artist completing an MFA at the University of British Columbia. She lives and works on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and sel̓íl̓witulh Nations.