Jennifer Huang's Return Flight is a collection that revisits. It is a present tense reaching out to the past, to culture, to language and country that you can only access at a slant and only in fragments. Huang frames their collection through four sections, three beginning with poems titled "Departure" and the last beginning with a poem titled "Layover" that bursts open at the collection’s core. The departures contribute memories: a moment from which each section of the collection can expand into a universe of intimacy, both loving and violent.
See the first "Departure" in its elastic repetition of words through half-cracked phrases that become comprehensible only in relation to one another: “I am learning to fly before I speak. / Learned to fly before I speak. / Before I could speak, I was left behind. / I leave behind the things that don’t belong /To me.” Or "Fantasy Self-Erasure," a detritus of sentences scattered over the page: “here hands / hands / me / still me,” calling back an image from the collection’s opening poem "Neighborhood Walk": “their hands / their hands! touch like a long goodbye”.
The first expansion overwhelms the poetic subject with disasters: forces inflicted directly on the body. There is the violence of a father and its consequences. A trace on the body, tangible and lasting: “my body, powerless with another; / forgiveness before I can even shape the words.” But perhaps not so clear-cut – the violence intertwines with love, and its traces are difficult to notice – leaving the reader with only a withering childhood and clothes that turn to ghosts on the drying line.
The second expansion witnesses growth and adolescence. There is a clutching onto memory, and an expressed fear of losing it, which Huang intertwines with poems on menstruation and childbirth. There is pleasure and the sudden unplaceable emotion in "Turbulence" that asks, “What pain is / the desire for pain?” At the core is a search for identity: in ancestors, in a body transforming, in a social role that is everywhere too foreign to belong.
Then, an interruption: "Layover." "an erasure of a poem I wrote in my Notes app during a trip my dad and I took to Taiwan in May 2019. The original text detailed the inadequacies, shame, and exhaustion of having to communicate with language barriers,” Huang writes in the note. Stretching across ten pages, each one differently formatted, this poem is a testimony to a struggle with settling one’s identity. It bristles with names, yet cannot settle on any single one: Taiwan, Formosa, a mountain, free China, “now ungrateful / child what name do / you crown yourself,” a father saying, “I am American to the taxi driver.” It is a layover: it starts, it ends, it is foreign and unsettling. It is a waiting in liminality, in a not-belonging yet wanting-to-belong.
There is, in the end, the third departure. One last memory, this time of everything that is beloved, that calls forth self-love. "How to Love a Rock" offers a moment of understanding of people leaving, changing, choosing their identities; and a final moment of laughter “bursting / from my lips. A cry as I caressed / a sun-wet afternoon. For only / I was left and then I left.”
Huang’s collection is a triumph in intimacy. It bursts with metaphor, with imagery dripping through the lines, with a mythology that transports you into a different world with each poem – a special form of spell written in the language of each poem itself. There is the occasional moment of stagnation, which is inescapable when themes repeat as they do in Huang’s returns, but the poem’s language swishes forward, and the collection regains its flow. It becomes, once again, a collection of tall mountains, bursting colours and flavours, and a historical depth that sends bodies through space and time in pursuit of love, however we might name it.
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