The 38 poems in Diana Cao's arresting debut collection, Slipstream, cast a wry eye over family history, nature, and technology.
The tone is by turns morbid and nostalgic as Cao revisits scenes from the past, such as her father's heart attack while on vacation in Morocco and life's altered rhythms during the Covid-19 pandemic. Solitude and suffering recur. The speaker feels jaded by days' repetitiveness, but travel proves disorienting. Several poems respond to her difficult relationship with a mother disappearing into dementia. Frequently, the structure employs repeated lines (a sestina; a sonnet corona in which the last line or two of one poem becomes the opening of the next), which suits the contents. Time collapses as vignettes from her immigrant mother's life in China and the U.S. alternate: "It is all neurofibrillary tangle/ the past flaring up into the present/ symptom of disease." Chinese characters, slant rhymes, and wordplay draw further attention to the slippery nature of meaning.
Wariness about technology is another robust theme, with "Privacy Policy" and "the algorithm moves toward an average" exposing the absurdity of online life ("When you sign up for this slipstream, you give us certain information voluntarily. This includes... the number of an emergency contact you broke up with five years ago"; "every day i prove my humanity to robots"). Nature provides an apt counterpart, with unusual love poems pinpointing lessons from butterflies, cicadas, and mantises. Blending traditional forms and a novel range of topics, Slipstream introduces Cao as a promising talent. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck