By Sarah Sukardi

William Maxwell, longtime editor of the New Yorker, famously said that “every writer has a lifetime ration of three exclamation points.” If this is so, then how many tildes is a writer allocated?

From Wo Chan’s debut collection, Togetherness, it appears that the answer should certainly be more than ten. For Chan’s is a collection that abounds with punctuation: tildes, exclamations, ASCII flowers, @topic references styled in the Twitter vernacular. All are fair game for usage, and also ripe to be used in a way that eschews any conventions for punctuation.

But I want to return to the tilde. Because if the exclamation point functions as a mere intensifier, whose straightforwardness begets the sort of sage advice that discourages its usage, the tilde is a more equivocal object. It has its official definition as a symbol that denotes similarity or approximation, though this is not how Chan deigns to use it. Rather, the tilde serves two different functions in their poetry. The first, as is used in “what do i make of my face / except,” functions as a rhetorical garnish: 

Here, the tilde evokes the lash of lightning’s tongue—the tilde visually “licks” the reader of the poem, inhering the line with a kind of sauciness particular to someone raised on the Internet. It also concretizes the “full yard of irony” Chan mentions in the previous line: the irony of welcoming the painful “lightning” of acne, and gesturing further toward it with punctuation. Chan’s usage of the tilde is multivalent, and the tilde is a particularly acute object through which to convey it, as it naturally allows for the performance of “both sincerity and irony.” If anything exemplifies the ethos of this collection, its complexity, its delight and large-hearted spirit of playfulness, it is the tilde. 

I mentioned that the tilde serves two functions in the collection. The second function of Chan’s tildes are as separators. Here, they are used specifically in conjunction with emoticon flowers: 
~~~

For what is the role of punctuation, if not to clarify, to separate and differentiate clauses from one another? Here, Chan questions, why not give this role to the tilde, or to a flower, rather than to the em dashes or asterisks we usually use? Why can’t “flowers… rhyme with anything”? The use of tilde and flower as separator becomes especially poignant when one considers that the name of Chan’s collection is Togetherness.

Because, embedded within the title is the central quandary of Chan’s poetry collection: what, precisely, is “togetherness,” and how does one convey and practice “togetherness” in the face of separation by a multitude of forces? The first question is perhaps easily answered by the Oxford English Dictionary: Togetherness, that strange adverb-turned-noun, is defined as “the state or condition of being together or being united; union, association.” But the latter question animates Chan’s collection, which they explore formally at every level from the line to the poem to the full collection.

For the collection is one centered around a particular kind of immigrant experience: one that requires working in the family restaurant business as a child. It’s a particular condition that results in forced togetherness, the kind that “can be brutal. yet we need it.” Chan writes, “I showered with [my brother], shared a room until I was 16.” It’s a closeness with lasting ramifications that intrude into the dream-space, as in the poem “i wish i could wake up and make a sincere apology:” 

i woke dreaming instead of a past lover rimming my asshole, his persona shifting into my brother’s face.

The same conditions, however, also beget the separation that occurs within the family, “already sweaty and floating through the shift home that wills to move us, / and will remove us from each other.” For if the poverty of a new country necessitates the labor that begets familial closeness, then the legal processes of the country itself can also engender isolation. Or as Chan says, “papers have us isolated.”

This structure of togetherness and separation is modeled throughout the level of the collection, which contains a medley of recurring poem types: prose poems, line-level palindromes, lyric monologues. Seldom are these poems of similar types juxtaposed next to one another; rather, they alternate in dizzying fashion, like a Skittles bag of poetic forms, jumbled together without their counterparts for company. The same structure also occurs at the level of theme: motifs of rice, food-competition reality TV, and Adderall prescriptions recur, though hardly ever in subsequent poems, requiring the reader to perform the act of coherence, of “togetherness,” the collection demands.

Finally, there exists one more kind of “structure” in the collection. They consist of letters in support of the Chan family for their legal deportation case, inserted verbatim. These letters, too, are scattered throughout the text, each one offering another image of the family from the outside:

To whomever it may concern:

…

In many ways, the Chan family has embodied the American dream. Kin Soi and Cheng Chao are always at their restaurant, providing for their family, still working hard even when most of our neighbors have already returned home for the evening….

Togetherness’s Table of Contents cites 44 separate poems, but these letters do not appear there. If the table of contents of a book is an accounting, then these letters are stricken from the record. They do not exist; the concept of “togetherness” is altogether obliterated by the state.

Togetherness is a restless collection, brimming with forms new and old, some prose-y and others firmly poetic, and all eclectic. Most of all, it’s a searching debut by a poetic voice that is as many parts scatological as it is experimental; as saucy as it is ebullient and sincere, as elided as it is overflowing.

Togetherness available from Alexander Book Co, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Garden District Bookshop, The King’s English Bookshop, Kinokuniya, and Talking Leaves.

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Sarah Sukardi is an essayist and occasional critic from the suburbs of Southern California. Sukardi is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.