FOCAL POINT

Praise for FOCAL POINT

“”While it often feels impossible to write something new about death, Jenny Qi has done it. Focal Point is beautiful and haunting, perfectly encapsulating the range of loss and curiosity.”—The Poetry Question

“A strikingly moving collection… Focal Point is a master class in approaching grief in poetry, in allowing the memories of lived experience thick with trauma to blossom into the most urgent literature…. If contemporary grief writing can be characterized as an ongoing conversation concerning tradition, memory, and death, then Focal Point is among the strongest examples of poets writing on those topics today, and one of the most intriguing poetic debuts in recent years.”—Vitni Review

“A haunting constellation of loss, dreams, violence, landscape, and spoken language springs from the mind of a scientist willing to question the things that resist answers: death, the capriciousness of power, the uncertainty of knowledge.”—Nashville Review

“…a frenzied search for meaning that underscores the enormity of the poet’s sorrow, and that sometimes yields profound insights: ‘To cure a thing / is to remove it from time.'”—Poetry Foundation Harriet Books

“In Focal Point, Qi allows the grief from her mother’s early passing to seep between each poem, to recede and return. The sacred mother-daughter love, displaced upon death, seeks other kinds of relationships. The pain felt in the initial moment of loss connects to other kinds of death, sometimes violent, national tragedies. The way the collection moves through time and theme captures the enduring nature of grief, and how it can expand to include whole communities, or contract to a single, intimate moment.”—The Rumpus

Qi is a poet of ravenous curiosity and clear logic, up against the bewildering mysteries of death. These are poems of a wide-ranging intellectual wandering.

Singapore Unbound

“Focal Point quilts together meditations on memory, bereavement, racism, divinity, and motherhood… . Its sixty poems forward a fresh, intertextual probe into experiences of transition and bring delicate attention to life in the wake of loss.”—ZYZZYZVA

“But then comes this marvelous book where she finally succeeds in pulling us toward her so we may join her in this painful experience. We feel we are with her, those who have suffered the death of a loved one and even those who haven’t yet. With the speaker, and to the extent possible—and risking an assumption—we feel we are with Jenny Qi.”—Compulsive Reader

“Typical of Qi’s poems, and indicative of the remarkable coherence of the collection as a whole, the effect of the poem is amplified by considering it in context… Grief, like the echoes within and between Qi’s poems, like the body itself, remains the pervasive element of the present, even as it recedes into the past.”—The Los Angeles Review

“Graciously, Qi’s formidable first collection does not leave us with any of the usual pat answers on which our loss-averse culture has grown so dependent. Instead, as California burns and thousands fall ill and die from a resurgent pandemic, her poems inspire us to look up at the sky and, perhaps for the first time, to focus on the questions themselves.”—Full Stop

“Though this is Jenny Qi’s debut collection, you’d never guess it from the poems, which deftly balance emotional rawness with meticulously-crafted lyricism. [N]othing could have prepared me for this excellent book, which…reads less like a debut collection than a veteran poet at the absolute peak of her skill.” —Michael Meyerhofer, Poetry Editor of The Atticus Review

Qi’s poems are dynamic and crackle with moments of hope and joy.

The Racket

“Reflecting on a bedside scene in the catalogue of her mother’s terminal illness, the speaker notes I was never a better daughter, as if to suggest the dying of a mother is an occasion we rise to, and in some frame, flourish under, but when that occasion lapses, as it does early on in Focal Point, the speaker ventures into asking how, then, do we exhaust ourselves? What animation, frame, or point of view keeps us from wilting with what has wilted after the vastness of the distance between those seemingly adjacent states of being has been witnessed intimately? Steeped in metaphors enabled by a speaker with a close proximity to science and art, Focal Point is a nuanced and heartfelt inquiry, a wonderful book.” —Dustin Pearson, 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award judge and author of Millennial Roost and A Family is a House

“Focal Point by Jenny Qi is a book of crossings. Here, a mother crosses over from the living to the dead, the daughter crosses over to having a mother and then no longer having a mother, all the while studying science, an organized system of knowledge. There is nothing organized or clear about dying, but the end. “I never believed in anything. / Now I believe in everything, / all the rituals of all the faiths,” writes the speaker. Qi grapples with disorder and order at once, endings and beginnings, mapping out a place where both co-exist because they have to. Focal Point is a beautiful and reflective book that inhabits the necessary liminal space of betweenness.” —Victoria Chang, author of Obit

“Focal Point is a book of losses: loss of innocence and loss of illusion, the loss of friends and lovers, but most of all the loss of a mother. Qi’s poems examine this loss not just through a daughter’s eyes but through a budding doctor’s, knowing the science of what will happen to her mother but not how to save her and, in conjunction, her own sense of the future. Most books about a parent’s death are written by medical outsiders. But Qi’s poems take us deep inside both her own grief and the limits of scientific knowledge to produce poems that, though plain-spoken, plumb a multitude of complex, unsettling emotions:  helplessness and guilt, rage, love, and even envy. These are poems that express the profound paradox of slowly healing from wounds you know you’ll never truly heal. As Qi writes, “[here are] all these places I have traveled without you / so I can forget how without you I am.”” —Paisley Rekdal, author of Nightingale

“In these moving, beautiful poems, central concerns of mortality, racial identity, personal relationships, and generational trauma and hope, are articulated in new and productively strange ways. Where else could we read a love poem about something called “telomeres,” which “guard the ends of chromosomes / and wane with every breath we take, / leaving fragments of ourselves behind.” These poems confidently, curiously, sorrowfully, optimistically, reveal a singular, exciting new voice in American poetry.” —Matthew Zapruder, author of Why Poetry and Father’s Day

“The poems in Jenny Qi’s haunting debut collection, Focal Point, are delicate the way a scalpel is delicate. A fine instrument is needed to carve into a reader the precise shape of loss, and Qi accomplishes this feat again and again in elegies for a cherished mother, for girlhood, for belonging, for lovers, and for the earth itself. This book chronicles “the heroic collision” of many types of love and the harrowing, indelible echo of grief even as its speakers choose the sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet pill of living. Jenny Qi’s poems tenderly, gorgeously grapple with what it is to be human, to be “magnificent things / flailing in the whistling / April wind.”” —Francesca Bell, author of Bright Stain

“It’s not often a poet arrives on the scene with her “voice” not just already intact, but richly developed. From the moment I first read a poem of hers I recognized a secure handling of language, a clear process of thought, and a clever use of poetic craft that together provided a fresh and uniquely authentic point of view. Arresting moments, frank observations of the self, and touching descriptions of the poet’s family and the relationships that prevailed. . . it is almost as if watching origami suspended in a jar. Qi is a talented poet with a warm heart and a strong desire to paint wonderful poems. Congratulations on her accomplishments thus far, and I am excited for her future. I highly recommend this book. Focal Point is a blossom opening.” —David Watts, author of Having and Keeping

 

Cover design: Hilary Steinberg