is a door

Including poetry projects, a chapbook and incidental poems previously published in magazines and by small presses, is a door makes use of the poem's ability for "e;suddenness"e; to subvert closure: the sudden question, the sudden turn, the sudden opening-writing that is generated from linguistic mindfulness, improvisation, compositional problem-solving, collaborative events, travel, investigation and documentary-in short, poetry as practice.Part one, "e;Isadora Blue,"e; is grounded in the author's encounter with the smashed and broken doors along the hurricane-devastated waterfront of Telchac Puerto, a small village on the north coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. It resonates throughout the other three sections of the book, with its attention to hybridity and "e;between-ness"e;-a poetic investigation of racialized otherness-and the composition of "e;citizen"e; and "e;foreigner"e; through history and language.Part two of this series of poems, "e;Ethnogy Journal,"e; written during a trip to Thailand and Laos in 1999, hinges around aspects of "e;tourist"e; and "e;native."e; Here the poems play in the interstices of spectacle, food and social sightseeing.Much of this poetry is framed by Wah's acute sense of the marginalized non-urban local "e;place"e; and coloured by his attempt to articulate senses of otherness and resistance, or writing the "e;public self,"e; particularly in the book's third section, "e;Discount Me In"e;-a series of sixteen poems from his discursive poetic essay "e;Count Me In."e;The fourth section, "e;Hinges,"e; is tinted with portraits of the social subject mired in a diasporic mix, a metanarrative trope in Fred Wah's work that began with Breathin' My Name With a Sigh.Characteristically playful and compositionally musical, this is poetry that watches both sides of the doorway: unsettled, unpredictable, closed and open. Sometimes the door swings and can be kicked. Sometimes it's simply missing. Sometimes it's a sliding door.