Imperium

Imperium
Jay Gao

In Psychopolitics the theorist Byung Chul-Han writes of freedom as ‘an interlude... to renewed subjugation’: ‘the freedom of Can generates even more coercion than the disciplinarian Should.’ The exhilarating poetic contours of Jay Gao’s remarkable collection, Imperium, trace the ways that illusions of freedom—especially as regards travel, hospitality, translation, hosting, guesting, the Homeric and experiencing the present as the present—correlate to the ways that power subjugates, coerces, and colonises.

Imperium opens with a poem, ‘Hero Worship’ that draws attention to what might be thought of as the ‘project-position’, as opposed to the subject-position, the desire to project oneself as the traveller or hero of one’s relation to the present—and the past: ‘One childhood ambition was to project myself way into the past like a statue’. Gao manages to elicit polythene squeaks of new familiarity from phrases like ‘childhood ambition’ that seem innocuous but suddenly pang, as though they harken back to a particular heroic narrative. Elsewhere, in the poem ‘Nobody’, a speaker remarks that ‘receiving messages from him was like hinging your body towards the past tense’, again intimating the pressures of a contemporary past—a seemingly endless groundhogging past—that is always threatening to shunt you into the ‘growing distance between your soul and that Translator you never spoke to at the bar’. As another poem puts it: ‘some say the past is never dead. It’s not even past’.

Imperium’s poems question lyric subjectivity; in fact they start from a position in which lyric subjectivity is always already acknowledged as sullied: ‘the end of the muse slipped into the day not like viral cells’. This doesn’t though stop much of this writing from feeling unbearably—in the most astonishing, unsettling, thrilling way—intimate. Intimacy becomes—somehow—possible in the destructive interrogation in language (‘taking down ancestral fairy lights’) of an ‘unspeakable contract’ with power.

With astonishing virtuosity, Imperium unpicks the very notion of virtuosity, and excellence, the inheritances of empire that dominate any idea of what poetry might be or aspire to. Gao’s talent sings and singes so heroically and deliciously across this mournful, provocative, desirous and subversive book. It’s ‘Abecedarian work’ of a sort, lying back and thinking ‘of antiquity’, the better to imagine its ramifications in the present as they come crashing down.

—Colin Herd