Saturn Peach
Lily Wang
Gordon Hill Press, 2020
Review by Clara Otto
CW: Brief mention of rape
Lily Wang’s Saturn Peach oscillates between the ethereal and the feral. The poems in this collection are filled with quiet longing, grief, and intimacy. The collection is divided into five parts: “re,” “unsolicited portraits,” “arcade,” “blue olives,” and “concert.” Each section illuminates a different facet of Wang’s speaker; as you read, a speaker starts to coalesce—someone who feels like a friend, someone who longs for a simple life, someone who could never accept a simple life.
Wang’s speaker makes incisive observations. In “Internet Stalker,” she writes, “some girls don’t like other girls because they / make their living off boy-luv & we all know / there’s not a lot of that to go around.” Throughout the collection, Wang’s speaker draws attention to misogyny with a light touch.
The waitress calls him “Adam’s Brother” and offers us shots.
She says I can order any pasta and they’ll make it, doesn’t have to be on the menu.
I feel so special next to Adam’s brother. I feel so lucky to be called into this scene.
(“Good Pasta”)
These moments are reflective of the speaker but, more broadly, reflect common phenomena—the desire to be subsumed by another—usually a man. This experience can feel liberating at first—one doesn’t have to make choices, hold opinions, have thoughts. It is, however, a false liberation. Much like the actual experience of being subsumed, “Good Pasta” has a jagged edge; something that catches, as illustrated in Wang’s uncanny use of repetition and rhyme:
I think it could be nice to leave my life behind, to be Adam’s Brother’s Girl.
I think it could be nice, so nice, I think it could be nice.
Jonathan drives home in the rain, I hope he gets back safe.
I hope he lives a happy life. I hope he thinks I’m nice.
In “BOY,” the form mimics the format of a screenplay which lends a feeling of dissociation to the poem. The speaker and the boy play house, which the speaker purports to love. As the poem unravels, though, the speaker nearly blinds themself trying to put on make-up. At the end of the poem the speaker and the boy get into the shower. The speaker says: “The water is hot and there’s no air. How can I sing? / How can I sing?”
The speaker’s inability to sing echoes the voicelessness women have experienced for centuries. It brings to mind a host of myths and fairytales: the little mermaid trading her voice for legs; Hera reducing the storyteller Echo’s ability to speak to parroting what others have said; and Philomela, whose tongue is cut out after she is raped.
Throughout the collection, Wang draws attention to how little space there is for women to fully exist:
I like to imagine us as a Quentin Tarantino film because here the girls are
fighters, here their pain is sensationalized, here we watch
them suffer, watch them suffer, watch them suffer. Bang
bang, I don’t have to reimagine us. My baby shoots me down and somebody
makes a cover of it, and a cover of it, and a cover of it. What an awful sound.
(Kill Bill: Vol. 1)
Here the speaker shows us what we give up when we trade ourselves. The “girls” in Tarantino films get to be larger than life, to be tough and beautiful, but they must suffer; they must pay in pain. This is a trade the speaker is never able to fully cash in on. Throughout these poems, the speaker’s feral self is always simmering at the edges. This feral self has an affinity for sea brine, is unafraid of contraindications, and would “die in a grocery store brawl” (“KIDS”).
This ferality comes into acute focus in “Magic Hour Confessions,” when the speaker writes: “I love to make people cry. I love to make them smile. Sadistic (like/skim milk) I would die for just about anybody.” Similar themes of violence, unpredictability, and desire emerge in “On Anne Carson”:
Look. Carson cuts and cuts deep to find the source of the
problem. She parts her heart to either side like hair.
Hopeless to gather what falls. Do you dream of her too.
The poems in “Part 2: Unsolicited Portraits” read like love letters to friends. In poems about the speaker’s friends, there is intimacy and an innate understanding. Even if the speaker and their friends can’t reach each other, there is grace. In these poems, there are options: the speaker is allowed to sit in the backseat; they are asked questions, but told they don’t have to answer. This sort of agency is not afforded to the speaker in the poems about their romantic partners. This is captured beautifully in “S”:
I am sitting in the back of my friend’s car,
Trying not to make this a sad poem.
Are you sure you don’t want to sit up front?
Have you ever been in love?
My friend takes me home, says I don’t have to answer,
asks, if your heart was a fruit what would it be?
Beautiful and sharp, Saturn Peach will draw you into a world that is intimate, tender, and severe. In this collection, Wang holds up a mirror to the world—and shows us both what we want to see, and what we don’t.
Clara Otto is a queer Canadian writer living on the ancestral and unceded lands of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples. Currently, she is an MFA student at the University of British Columbia. Her work has been published in Plenitude Magazine, Ruminate, The Puritan, and elsewhere.