Light Spill
Laura Mota-Juang
Block Party, 2023
Review by Bridget Huh
Laura Mota-Juang’s imaginative debut chapbook, Light Spill, creates an electrifying atmosphere where abstract concepts and intimate longings alike materialize in startlingly luminous forms. These are poems committed to stretching the laws of physics as far as they will go, experiments in time and distance as much as in form and style.
Mota-Juang’s inclination towards experimenting with hybrid forms is apparent in the variety of genres encompassed in the chapbook. The tripartite “Newborn and Dead Walk Home” might be understood as both poem and lyric essay, seamlessly moving from one genre to another, one discrete section to the next. Each section is an account of our perception of time as understood by figures such as Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli or the speaker’s grandmother, who each interrogate the distinction between past, present, and future in their own way. Mota-Juang writes, “I is as Indexical as Now, Here and Tomorrow. I-Today and I-Yesterday are contained in the vessel of My Body. I am newborn and dead as I walk home.” She elucidates these theories of time in clear and precise language that both perplexes and delights.
Many of the poems in Light Spill do not explore the ideas of physics so much as completely invert them, turn them on their heads. In “drinking light,” a poem that appeared in PRISM international’s Summer 2021 issue, the speaker contemplates particle behaviour in conversation with Kurosawa’s Journey to the Shore. This poem is our introduction to the principal image animating the collection: light as a liquid. “If light behaved as liquid and we poured it into a glass,” explains the speaker, “we wouldn’t be able to see its brightness. / If not a wave, if not spreading, light doesn’t reach the eye.” For the speaker, it seems that this striking image of a dim glass of light is simultaneously an expression of grief and potentially a projection of one’s relationship with a loved one.
This collection is seeking a vocabulary for the intimate, the human, in physics terminology. The poem “Thought Experiment for Greedy Lovers” hypothesizes a level of closeness that might be “treasure hunts,” “a secret language,” “synchronized by randomness,” or “silent communication marked by the golden rust of consumption.” The speaker wonders “if Love would be fuller if it caused us to exchange electrons . . . We would love / not to death, / but to oxidation!” This thought experiment exemplifies Mota-Juang’s characteristic sensitivity not only to what is but also to what could be—to that which cannot be proven or explicated, to miracles, to possible yet unrealized worlds.
My favourite poem in the collection, “sand gatherer,” explores Mota-Juang’s belief in the extraordinary as the speaker waits “for stars to fall from an unconstellated sky.” The speaker’s eyes are “miracle beggars,” a breathtaking metaphor that stuns even before the explanation that they are “always hollow and glassy / famished for proof.” To beg for miracles is to reject the subsistence of banal proof, of crude logic. In Light Spill, readers cannot help but fall into believing, begging Mota-Juang for miracles that, with each subsequent poem, she succeeds in delivering.
The final piece in the chapbook is the eponymous “Light Spill,” a lineated prose narrative that imagines a world, not so unlike our own, in which all light is transformed into liquid. “Light Spill” epitomizes Mota-Juang’s dedication to experimentalism: here, speech is slowed, savoured, sprawling across the page with the fluidity of liquid light. And where light is absent, it is instead Mota-Juang’s vivid and evocative prose that illuminates the page, drawing the reader into her world of slow tenderness.
Bridget Huh is a queer Korean poet completing her undergraduate studies at Concordia University. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, PRISM International, The Ex-Puritan, and Canthius. She is the winner of the 2023 Vallum Poetry Award, and her debut collection of poetry is forthcoming from Véhicule Press.