Clambering for Metaphor

Jaye Chen reviews Steven Duong’s “At the End of the World There Is a Pond.”

By Jaye ChenJanuary 30, 2025

• Poetry

“[T]HE ANTHROPOCENE / demands a new syntax.” At the End of the World There Is a Pond, Steven Duong’s highly anticipated debut collection, delivers on its own provocation with a thoroughly new poetics of becoming. Duong’s poems are as wise as they are sharp, as unassuming as they are biting; his concerns are thoroughly universal. How do you fight that sense of paralysis, coming of age at the end of the world? Well, say yes to trauma, say yes to ecstasy: say yes to sonnets about the indie musician Mitski, odes to rapper Rico Nasty, tercets about chess sets, lyrics about Tolkien’s invented languages. Verse after verse, Duong shows us how to take the weight of everything one is given and watch it become as light as fish scales, to descend into ourselves and make a new world by hand: “The only way to sink / is to empty yourself. // The only way in is down.”

And down we go. Into a world of crossings and even more descents, of museums and bedrooms, of synesthetic metaphors: “& sleep-thin, we ride into the crawlspace / of January, meet I-80’s long blank stare with / our eyes red & our needs seated between / us like strangers.” On the way, we encounter living bodies of steel and water, lush with rhythm and heartbeats, flanked by the moon, mint leaves, and pop music glitter. It is the gravity of history itself that pulls us down, but it doesn’t feel like a journey to the underworld. Duong’s metaphysics is far more cyclical and generative. As the philosopher Simone Weil once wrote, “We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.” This collection convinces you that acts of undoing—rising and ebbing between poems titled “Untogether” and “Undiaspora”—are exactly where new things come from, how new selves get made. A new world—or just a way to be okay—is what is teething from the pains of the past: “The end of one world / might spell / the beginning of another, as in / there are pills you take & pills that take you.”

In the title poem, “At the End of the World There Is a Pond,” Duong reverse engineers a creation myth in medias res. As soon as the world begins, we are drowned in its history. There’s no deluge in this version of creation: the water was already there. “The water is wet, the fish finned / & wriggling”; “That water wets itself, that fish / whet larger fish.” Yet Duong insists that it is our duty to question pain itself (“What the fuck is a necessary violence?”), to gently but firmly reject the trauma of the world we are given. Time and again, the poem utters “Or no,” like a haunting chorus that echoes through nesting sets of internal rhymes. As the stanzas become barer toward the end of the poem, they also become chock-full of geography: Duong’s transcontinental sinking took us from Mekong to Shaanxi to the bottom of Lake Malawi. The poetic voice, at once a hurt human and a slippery fish, never ceases to marvel at the miracle of its own survival: “I am beginning to feel optimistic about the aquarium. / The plants are growing like weeds, the fish / like fish.”

In this sense, Duong swiftly picks up from Chen Chen’s famous ellipsis, “despite despite despite.” How is this broken, tattered world still so beautiful for our sake? After all, there is so much going on, and so much to take in—the family histories gained and lost in migration, blurry memories of bygone violences in an anonymous motherland, addictions, climate anxiety, and yes, even love. Yet these poems leave no time to wallow, and say no to swimming blindly: jump, find another body of water. Try again, because why not? “Still, we / throw bodies at bodies. We flank. We flail. We open fire / like it’s a door, like it leads somewhere.” You could only free yourself by becoming yourself.

Duong’s poetic voice is always shape-shifting. The collection is divided in four sections: the jumpers, the swimmers, the sinkers, the floaters. Types of fish, yes, but also types of ways to live in relation to those bodies of water we call trauma and history. Within the collection, new structures arise on top of another: in each section, we find a poem titled “Novel” that traces the composition of a novel in different stages, an ode to rappers in different years of the Chinese zodiac, and travel poems through Vietnam and China. From fish jumping out of water to rappers who are worshipped like Buddhist idols, Duong is a poet of the unconscious: he lifts up those startling metaphors of nature and history to reveal intrusive thoughts and nagging questions, and trims their spikes. These poems wiggle and wink within the very forms they’ve inhabited and mastered, never haute nor cliché. In Duong’s odes, sonnets, incantations, and lyrics, we find hauntings without stagnation, cyclicality without repetition. Form is holy, form is dirty, form should free us. At times, Duong’s verses can feel so nimble that they seem to jailbreak from their forms altogether.

To polish his myth, Duong turns to the ekphrasis of popular culture. No reference is off the table: a postcard, a pill, a Mongolian chess set exhibit, a biology textbook, Future, Bob Dylan, Biggie Smalls, Lord of the Rings. A twin epigraph opens the collection: a scientific fact about jumping fish, and a lyric from the electropop band Kero Kero Bonito’s glitter-doused song “Trampoline.”Long couplets of fish-bodies in pond water unravel alongside the “808s [that] thump on like mortars,” and other things that wake you from a pill. You know a collection is unflinchingly alive when you want the poet’s playlists. True enough, this is a poetics of pop music unlike any other. “I keep a list of songs that make me cry,” the poet professes, showing us exactly what people mean when they say a song means so much to them. Hyperpop is for flying; hip-hop sublates suffering and still knows “all the lyrics to joy.”

Faithful to its epigraph, the collection jumps rapidly between long, legato couplets and snappy, staccato invocations, flying to where it wants to be. In “Ode to Future Hendrix in the Year of the Goat,” luxury name-drops and substance use crescendo above the “Ragged throat. Slur-breath. Deathwish hiccupping” into a prayer: “May we one day grow as / full as the moons behind your tongue […] No past. No future. Just two bottomless cups.” Duong is always polyrhythmic, never cacophonous, the poetic equivalent of EMDR therapy: the reader’s eyes track an image that rapidly dashes between the different locales a poem might inhabit, exiting the poem with a new way to be in the world. It is the things we see, the songs we like, and the images we keep that make and unmake a person; we are the sum of our references, the sum of our metaphors.

In a sequence of interconnected sonnets, Duong makes Mitski, the poet Hai-Dang Phan, Duong’s own mother, and an anonymous ghost into gods of the frustrated subconscious. Their words and deeds and memories echo through moments of substance abuse and bad drives on I-80, leaving only unanswered questions: “What is love / but a stained driveway, the body but its after- / math? Ones & zeroes cut raw in the glass.” In another poem, “Worldship,” Duong offers a hysterical, tongue-in-cheek critique of diaspora poetry by turning its own overwrought metaphors and not-quite-free verse on itself. Behind the “Tumblr blue & 4chan green” of internet literature, Duong warns, “rogue memoirists seize the gunnery” of those limp and tender metaphors of “born-again Koreans” and “dumplings / tongues & bubble tea”—to say absolutely nothing at all. Bad diaspora poetry is actually no less serious than an act of self-cannibalization: “we are approaching what historians / call a Donner Party situation.”

That sense of justice echoes throughout the collection: Duong’s poetics insists on doing right by its own metaphors. If it doesn’t free us, then we don’t want it at all. In “Veneers,” a tender prose poem where the facades of buildings become the skins we wear around others, Duong writes: “Against the grand hopes of my ancestors, all this red brick makes me think of Harvard.” In another poem, a novel writer, feeling unable to speak on behalf his parents, brings up lines of his characters to speak for himself: “War, then, is two rivers / bleeding into the sea—these lines, they belonged / once to me. The son I couldn’t help but be.”

When bodies fail, our myths and free associations become biological realities in their own right. Under the touch of an unfamiliar body, the poetic voice “clamber[s] for metaphor.” Nowhere is this transformation more evident than in Duong’s stunning endings: “I lived & I lived / For you I did it elsewhere.” “How American to be ruined then whole / then ruined again.” “[T]here is no language alone / that can eulogize the living.” “Everyone / who ever wanted to live is dead. The rest of us tread water.” Again and again, Duong’s endings return his poetry to the bodily, material reality, to the clouds “fat with the sort of rain we live for.” Another lyric poem, “Ashes at Kande Beach, Malawi,” ends its meditations on the anonymity of harm and conquest with two shivering couplets:

& yes, let every embrace of sole & earth be an
elegy. Why not be dramatic? Let the birds get fat.

Let the pills get heavy. Let us not walk anywhere
without treading on grief upon grief upon grief.

At the end of Duong’s debut, we find nothing less than rapture—an end that is also an ecstatic beginning. Watching how some of these poems deconstruct their forms feels like falling through an endless body of water; others, with their pop song rhythms and images that keep taking you higher, feel like catching your breath after a long, satisfying bounce on a trampoline. In the face of the contradictions we inevitably bear in our personal histories, we take whatever we can to make sense of the past. We take the Black Speech of Mordor to make sense of how even the fantasy worlds to which we escape can inherit the racialized moralities of this one, the lucky gold cat at a restaurant register to make sense of those things we no longer believe in, but to which we nevertheless pray.

Could it really be that easy? Could a poetics for living really be as simple as the internal rhymes at the end of a prose poem—like how this line almost dissolves into a harmony? “If not for yourself, do it for me. For our / dogs & our birds & our trees.” If metaphor or myth is that “mode of torture in / which you bend a body until it says / what you want it to,” then everything we encounter could be holy, could explain our bodies, speak for us, and ultimately free us. At the end of trauma, there is a rave; at the end of the day, we are all clambering for metaphor.