Litany for the Long Moment

“I am writing into the rupture, the absence left there,” writes Mary-Kim Arnold in her book.

Framed through a Korean television questionnaire, the book investigates how loss (of parents, of a homeland, of language) dislocates us. This lyric essay collages personal and public documents, rifling through history in search of tethers, poetics rubbing against the barest of facts.

I’m still, over ten years later, combing through my father’s things, knowing, as this book does, that the only answer is the search. It’s the desire to know, not the knowing itself, that matters.