![]() “Language is not what’s said but what’s silenced,” Chang writes. She shares them with Ben, who helps Daughter translate the meaning of the letters further – to make sense of her past, her inheritance, and her own queer body. As Daughter falls in love with her classmate, a girl named Ben, she begins to translate the holes’ letters into English. The physical force of inherited violence, loyalty, survival, love, and queerness that Daughter embodies shows up in small and large ways. They periodically spit out letters from her grandmother, who grew up in Taiwan but lives in another California town.“I, too, was a direct descendant of gravity, born from women who belonged inside their countries the way blades belonged inside a body,” Chang writes. They multiply in number and depth, and are somehow breathing. ![]() Growing up in California, Daughter one day discovers holes in the yard. Told from the point of view of Daughter, a Taiwanese American early-adolescence girl, the book deftly threads together three generations of women with each other, land, water, trauma, violence, and love. ![]() Its prose is relentlessly, ruthlessly corporeal, and it is fearlessly beautiful. Reading poet (and Lambda Literary Award finalist) K-Ming Chang’s debut novel, Bestiary (One World, 2020), is a visceral experience. Ruthlessly Corporeal, Fearlessly Beautiful: K-Ming Chang’s Bestiary ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |