By Emily Velasquez
Kien Lam, winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series and author of the debut poetry collection, Extinction Theory, invites readers who have for generations been internally grappling with questions of existence to reencounter language as the primordial stage of being. Every poem in this collection fervently focuses on how the marginalized tongue, body, and mind find meaning in a world that has already claimed meaning over them. What is most compelling about this collection is how Lam uses the word extinction to question his existence and most specifically what it means to exist as a Vietnamese American.
Through many of these poems, Lam expands on the conflicting filters that pollute language and most importantly the migrant language as he addresses in his poem, “Apogee.” In the poem, he calls American English a holy tongue – in other words, a tongue viewed as clean, proper, and empowering. In this piece, Lam is generating a memory on learning how to speak English, writing, “This is how I learned / English—chanting / the alphabet / until it felt natural, / like language / is something you / are born with / and not given / Or taken.” These are the extractions that Lam gathers and slowly weaves as moments to exert how much of our identity is washed away and made extinct since birth through language assimilation.
In this three-part collection, Lam chooses surprising titles for his poems such as “Light Perception,” in which he circulates around subjects like UFOS, space, stars, science, and military bases to seek ground and connections with his Vietnamese language, at one point referring to Vietnamese as an “alien tongue.” This poem humanizes language and does not resist making readers a particle of that space between light and perception and between American English and Vietnamese. I was personally moved by this poem, since I have experienced shame for speaking Spanish in public places, especially when needing to translate for my parents, and this poem created room for the scattered voices that do not know if the light is hitting near or far from them, the same voices who may have had their mother tongues made extinct by the dominance of English. I resonated immensely with Lam’s final declaration when he states, “but the human tongue is something else it is not a monster / it can only / bite if you teach it it can only teach you there is more than one way / to see a light if you turn your head just slightly.” The closing lines leave an imprinted image of light that inclines the reader to question and detach themselves from the contentment of what is depicted as standard or appropriate language.
The more you meditate on each poem in Extinction Theory, the more you will find out that Lam is carefully upholding life on these extinct questions, questions on belief, love, distant mothers, divorced fathers, and language: what most aim to extinguish before the tongue feels.
Extinction Theory is available from Alexander Book Co, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Garden District Bookshop, Moon Palace Books, and Skylight Books.
Emily Velasquez is a poet who loves anything about food and cooking. Born and raised in Santa Ana, she received her B.A. in English from California State University Fullerton. She is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing from Chapman University.