Lo Kwa Mei-en’s poetry frames the immediacy and the urgency of personal identity—what it means to be a person—within poems that are spare, wide, and often difficult. By spare, I mean that the structures of many of her poems consist of a few thin threads, letting her syntax flow in the breeze. By wide, I mean that her poems expand and stretch as they flow in the breeze, leaving lots of empty but meaningful space on the page.

And because the forms and syntax of these poems are often difficult, you can feel a little disoriented as you read The Bees Make Money in the Lion. But the volume’s certain images and themes help stabilize and return you to (what I interpret as) Mei-en’s central concern: the way in which citizenship and national identity strip away the experience of being human like skin being stripped from a martyr. It’s about biopolitics, basically, if you want to use a Foucauldian term. If the word “Foucauldian” doesn’t turn you off. God, I sound like a grad student.

The images and themes I refer to brush against the limits of what it means to be a human being. Mei-en incorporates all kinds of references to non-human animal life (or to zoology as such) and to extraterrestrial life (frequently playing on the fact that the word “alien” refers to extraterrestrial beings and to immigrants, migrants, and refugees). “Zoology counts us in,” she writes, “as against them and against joining them, as not a fair choir but chimeras in yellow moods, like a feral cat burying her fleas….” The “us” that zoology taxonomizes so uncharitably could be human beings in general, or it could be an immigrant being interpellated within the American state (which is a huge part of Mei-en’s biography).

In one of the collection’s best poems, “Aubade with Beginning, End, and Zodiac,” Mei-en writes:

Zoophobia predicted my alien romance. In the year of the lam,/ an Earth boy spit out my tooth. It was red like a page of the sun/ yellow as the word he held me down on. He called me a real/ bitch between the streets on fire, flower, and fur. There was no/ xenogenesis in the future and no future in which the schtick/ colonized my cage away.

These quotations are drawn from two of the volume’s later poems, where Mei-en’s arguments become more explicit and the collection’s narrative logic begins to cohere. The above quotation synthesizes the animal and extraterrestrial imagery nicely. Both quotations make surprising use of the word “yellow,” which of course is a loaded word for an Asian American writer. One can feel, within the difficult syntax stretched over the wide/loose structure, the agonizing process of a personal identity being molded and interpellated within a steel vice of political and national systems. “What if a nation is that,” Mei-en writes, “One master/ forger makes love to an old master’s debts One asshole/ tells the difference Sold: self-landscape in old leather/ More power to the broker Let’s grow gold together/ There are lines of beast and boast…”

Mei-en’s wordplay can be a little forced (“let’s grow gold together,” “a real bitch between the streets”), but I do that kind of thing all the time so who am I to judge?

A lot of ink has been spilled in recent years arguing that formally “difficult” or formally “innovative” poetry historically has been weaponized against poets of color. Which, yeah, that’s true. But Mei-en helps demonstrate the potential for difficult poetry to express the voices of people whose identity has been stripped by the politics of nationhood, and to express those voices with perfect clarity.