By Genevieve Hartman
Content notes: suicide, depression
Joan Kwon Glass’s debut poetry collection, Night Swim, is an elegy for two loved ones lost to suicide: the speaker’s young nephew and two months later, his mother, the speaker’s sister. Glass divides the book into five sections, each titled after a stage of grief, and speaker and reader move together through these stages. Heavy with heartbreak, these poems memorialize the dead, ruminate on the pain of surviving loss, and offer a place for others lost in grief to rest, knowing they are not alone.
The collection opens with the eponymous poem, “Night Swim,” which describes a man swimming “undetected / across the East Sea, along the border of North and South Korea.” He is caught, “confused, afraid and hypothermic.” The speaker is clearly sympathetic, seeing something of themself in this man:
How many of us have swum through
current of grief or shock
only to find ourselves disoriented, standing
on the shore of a strange country?
After loss to suicide, the landscape doesn’t
change, but everything else does.
The man’s journey is likened to loss, where grief is a “strange country” a person can swim to. In particular, the suddenness and violence of loss to suicide creates, in the span of moments, strangeness and instability where there was once familiarity and solid ground. This poem sets the stage for the rest of the collection, with its invocation of loss to suicide. The poem ends with an image of the man, trying to convince himself that this foreign country is truly his home, and this disbelief resonates throughout the book, as the speaker learns the landscapes of their new life in the unfamiliar and unwanted new home of grief.
My family suffered our own sudden loss last year. While it wasn’t to suicide, it was a completely unexpected tragedy. What struck me initially when reading Night Swim—especially in the first section, “Denial,” which details the immediate aftermath and funerals of the speaker’s sister and nephew—were the small details the speaker clings to: watching the movie Lion the night their nephew died, what they ate before viewing their sister’s body at the morgue, the black dress their sister laid out to be buried in. In “First Sunrise,” the speaker recalls standing at the copy machine in the school they work at before anyone else knows of their loss. Despite this tragedy, the school moves on as it always does, with colleagues and students in the halls. The speaker is removed from it, in shock, remembering, “The sun had not risen yet / on that first day without him in the world. / But it did. It has every day since.” Glass perfectly captures the way that time moves slower in those first days of tragedy, when everything appears through new eyes, and everything is a “first” in this new axis of life. In other words—“the landscape doesn’t / change, but everything else does.” The sunrise changes, a movie changes, clothing changes, the workplace changes. “Everything” includes the people who are grieving, too.
The poem “Cartouche” begins,
When you died,
mom insisted we remove
every photo from the walls.
Not just the ones with you in them,
but also of me and my children.
And your children.
All people react to grief differently, and for the speaker’s mother, every family photo, even the ones that don’t portray her lost child and grandchild, voice her loss too loudly for her to bear looking at them. It is easier to face bare walls than the smiling faces of a family not yet wracked by death. The poem closes, “Pretend that something, / anything / other than her absence / can endure,” echoing the emptiness left by a daughter and a sister’s suicide. It might seem strange, especially to people who have not experienced their own deep losses, to catalog these intimate moments and small changes. The whole book is filled with achingly sad recollections like the ones noted here. But Glass expertly and lovingly conveys them in Night Swim, knowing that while it is incredibly painful to remember one’s touchstone moments of grief, it is infinitely worse to forget them.
Beginning with “Denial,” each section of the book is announced with a solid black page, and a large Roman numeral indicating the number of the section. Each numeral is filled with an image, mostly obscured at first, with more white space revealed in each subsequent section. Light slowly returns as the speaker moves from “Denial” to “Anger” to “Bargaining” to “Depression” to “Acceptance.” This journey through the stages of grief takes place over several years after the speaker’s loss, and everything from therapy sessions, to graveside visits, to childhood memories, to feelings of survivors guilt, to lines from the police report are revealed. While the book speaks most directly about the speaker’s loss, other ideas emerge as the speaker shares their grief: religious belief, cultural identity, and mental health and illness. They can’t help but appear, as they play a role in both the tragedy and the healing.
For example, the speaker and their sister both have left the Christian faith that their mother holds to. And yet, in the poem, “The Joke,” the speaker says, “our mother is running my sister’s wake like a Sunday church service.” They imagine their sister rising from the dead to protest this false display, which may bring comfort to some, but is a trite and meaningless joke to the speaker. Later, the speaker documents their spiritual journey in the poem “Holy Places,” which is written to their nephew and opens,
Before your birth, I searched for God
in churches and temples, lightning storms…
In your short life, I knelt beside you.
Their nephew’s life and death have deeply influenced the speaker’s religious belief. At any point in time, a person’s faith is complex, and belief can be difficult, but particularly with this loss of young life, the speaker implies that their search for belief in God has ended. They reminisce about the moments of pure joy that the two of them experienced, laughing together in spaces that were uncomplicated by religion, but nevertheless holy, and what they have realized in the aftermath of their nephew’s death:
In your absence, I still wake,
write what I learned too late:
that there is no church but that
square of light
where I knelt beside you.
The speaker proclaims “church” to be a bright floor in someone’s home where they played with their beloved nephew, because it represents something both untouchably sacred and tangible, something to cling to, when by contrast, their search for God seems to have proved fruitless.
The speaker also recalls parts of their personal history throughout the collection, often moments that include their departed sibling. In the poem “Dear Sister,” the speaker addresses their sister, first by reliving childhood memories visiting relatives in Korea and roller skating together in the basement in wintry Michigan. These are carefree, happy memories, but they quickly become saturated with the speaker’s loss, and the speaker turns again to the irony of the sister’s religious wake and the insensitive people who attended. The poem continues,
What no one tells you about losing your sister,
about losing her to suicide, is that in one crushing hour,
your childhood becomes a moonless well.
You try to pull the bucket back up and remember the good times,
but since your death, the good times just feel like the bad times.
Here the watery images from the titular poem return, the darkness of the well overwhelming the speaker’s childhood joy. I am particularly drawn by the way the speaker notes, “what no one tells you.” After our family’s loss, I noticed the parts of losing someone that no one tells you about, too—scrubbing the house for visitors, the paperwork, the phone calls, the flashbacks—how much work it was to hold yourself together. The speaker’s desire to tell the reader what no one else will tell serves as an unburdening of the self, but it also feels like a sisterly act of kindness, a course in preparedness. Conversation around grief is removed from the public eye for many reasons—it’s too depressing, too painful, too messy, too personal. But refusing to talk about loss, especially loss to suicide, only creates people who are unprepared to face the inevitability of death. Of course, one can never fully prepare, but shying away from painful topics doesn’t erase their existence. Night Swim insists on talking about death and surviving loss, refusing to look away from the harsh facts. This is the collection’s greatest strength. It reminds us that we need to keep returning to the moonless well, keep waiting for the bucket to finally draw up good times once again. Glass will later write of “a turning away from the room where your life will end / and toward whatever light the world still holds.” Grief teaches us that surviving and living are different, and that those of us who are still alive and grappling with loss must, and can, relearn how to live our lives again, how to draw up good times from our own wells.
Perhaps more than most collections, it is difficult to extract the author from the speaker of the poems in Night Swim, since both have experienced these twin devastating losses, and have lost the same people. To read this book is to partake, in a small way, in Glass’s own sorrow. Here is a tender yet honest tribute to two beloved family members, where the rawness of loss to suicide is laid out, rife with survivor’s guilt, regrets, and what ifs. Here is Glass’s own version of the “black river of loss” that Mary Oliver references in her poem “In Blackwater Woods,” rendered with painful, fracturing intimacy. Here is a grief so great that it threatens to flood the banks and overwhelm everything, and even in the midst of the deluge, here is Joan Kwon Glass, offering a flicker of light for a way forward.
Genevieve Hartman is a Korean American writer based in Rochester, New York. She is Publicist for Alice James Books and Social Media & Outreach Coordinator for Adi Magazine. Her poems and reviews have been published in The Rumpus, Rain Taxi Review, River Mouth Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and others. Follow her on Instagram at @gena_hartman or find her at genahartman.com.