Ward Toward

Cindy Juyoung Ok’s Ward Toward explores how architectural structures uphold, bind, incarcerate, and incubate. Like preliminary construction plans that can be actualized differently, the arrangement of Ok’s poems invites alternative readings. In her previous chapbook, House Work (2023), which explores the work invested in refurbishing enclosed spaces, Ok used a similar style. “Composition of a Raft,” written in parallel columns that may be read horizontally or vertically, suggests that the trust implied in promises of fulfillment (“how much relief is / in promise”) can so easily be endangered in another reading: “how much relief is / like panic / in promise.” New recombination poems in Ward Toward take this idea further.

In “The Orders,” numbered lines of each quatrain suggest that that we read all lines numbered 1 together, and then 2, and so on. In one reading, the poem ends with a sense of self-loss in a psychiatric ward: “questions about my mind’s intention / which, like ward windows, held gaps.” In another possible reading, it is the incarcerated body “thinned at its own perimeters” that “held gaps.” As with the poem’s recombination, the framework of a space/body holds variables within a set structure. People, nations, schoolrooms, and languages are constantly being formed, never conclusively made.

Ok’s wards nevertheless also confront the load of history that conditions and limits: even as it is being newly created, the landscape of “Moss and Marigold” is interspersed with crime scenes from a past: “caution tape around oak trees, // landline lights blinking, and pictures of parents laid / as bookmark.” The following poem, “Before the DMZ,” is shaped in two Koreas, confronting the political and personal history of Ok’s family left north of the dividing line. Tapping into the terza rima’s surging narrative force, Ward Toward turns to unrhymed tercets when confronting forces that sweep us into categories of gender and race. In “Ward of One,” the abuser excuses his domestic violence by saying that “his fists had been for emphasis and would // never have been laid.” The arena of violence becomes public in “Nap Plot,” where the speaker tries negotiating for the sake of a collective “we” in face of an impending “mass stabbing,” while “In Atlanta” turns to the 2021 shooting, addressing the images of victimized East Asian femininity in the aftermath of public violence:

… there is not a fear of new
attention but of what is revealed as abiding,
realities confirmed about my beautiful

and disposable body, effortlessly endable,
after all a symbol, even in hiding,
and my title a metonym for wartime

sex, compulsive lure and, cheek to chink,
our famous flatness …

“Chink” flags both a racial insult and the brittleness of porcelain; more disturbing than remaining at the mercy of “one man’s really / bad day” is this “abiding” equation between breakability and the Asiatic body. The nine tercets of this poem are spun into nine paragraphs of three lines in the prose poem “Rights,” which confronts the speaker’s status as both othered migrant and complicit settler, blaming and blamable:

Far from family now, I am confused not for individuals but for other groups.
I become an index for the unknown, for the invasive …

Such confusion from abstraction can harm, but it can also be a coping mechanism. Ok is also interested in the affordances of seeing common structures through particulars. When friends are lost by death and misunderstanding in “Surviving Inklings,” one copes by relinquishing the details of each relationship:

………….…. You forget
the contours slowly, in
the long second leaving,

neutrality a structure
you learned to glamorize,
the way you have come to

imagine doors as rectangular.

The art of losing is mastered by loosening particulars, when all doors become a rectangular form. One could say that such bareness is poor compensation, but in “Curtain,” Ok asks, “Is abstraction still luxury // in a world in which—suppose—you don’t / feel watched?” Under the eyes of those who project gendered and racialized determinations onto one’s body, abstraction can be more than a luxury, a fugitive technique rather than impersonal withdrawal.

Sparseness can redesign spaces to admit new guests. The shaped poems “Degeneration” and “Signs” test whether the rectangle can be an aperture rather than a door slammed shut. Visually mimicking blocks of newspaper reportage, the poems hint at historical referents in modern Korean history: the classroom of “Degeneration” recalls the ban against Korean language education during Japanese colonization, while the sparsely populated island of “Signs” gestures at ongoing territorial disputes between South Korea and Japan. Yet the poems do not stabilize their referents: naming no names, Ok instead makes the poems legible for various experiences of dispossession. Encoding specific colonial histories but making them communicable across contexts, the poems leave doors ajar between the oft-segregated wards of national histories.

Abstraction, architecture, structure: in Ward Toward, these are never quite bare or dissociative, but rather interlaced with linguistic play and overlaid with personal and political weights. As Ok puts in “Orientation,” architecture cannot exist without the person inhabiting it: “Form outlives / us, but barely.” Structures find life via inflections of human usage. Ward Toward shows how such a user and lover of language builds new architectures of communication, where we are all tenants or visitors, but never quite proprietors.