Review: Suede Mantis / Soft Rage

For the Soft Rage Inside Us All
Review: Suede Mantis / Soft Rage

Lesley George

​Jennifer Soong
Collection of Poems
Black Sun Lit, pp. 105
Cost: $18.00

Carefully balancing lyric poem conventions with a bold delineation of human emotion, Jennifer Soong plays with different aesthetic forms in her most recently released collection, Suede Mantis / Soft Rage. Soong explores a variety of poetic compositions–it is a project of the mind, a submittance to raw emotions in exchange for a curious, but risqué, visual sorting of thoughts.

The collection is set into three parts, each one focusing on a different style of poetic disposition. Soong begins with highlighting the theme of looking back on memories and allowing the emotions attached to them to come to life. From then her work moves page-to-page, long and flowing until a page break. As she writes, her words become more pointed, but with intention she experiments with the expectations of a poem, denouncing the pride attached to poems and creating a space where she can reject any significance they’re supposed to hold in her life and write freely.

​Like many poets, Soong has a lot of pieces that center the theme of love; however, she expresses love not for the fuzzy and warm feeling, but for the death of budding love:

old shirt
stab your love for him
            make it die
​an old shirt, like a puddle on the floor.

​This theme of death, of abandonment of painful feelings and memories is expressed in such a delicate way despite the intensity of the words showcases Soong’s ability to toy with juxtaposing concepts. At times, her words feel conversational, almost as though she is talking either to herself, and, sometimes, to someone else—like if she is giving a warning for others to learn from her past.

​Her pieces titter on the edge of being abstract with just enough mystery, with the help of vivid imagery and a blend of poetic voice and candid phrasing, to create pieces that highlight her own self reflection. Soong directly speaks to the reader as she does so: 

Stay with me, or else
these words were clipped for nothing.
...not even in misery, our mutual feeling.
...What would be the point of that, reader,
save to cut you with the blunt end
of my face reproduced in the knife?
            (lines 1-10)

Focusing more on the visual depiction of the text, each part alternates between one solid black page and a page with three flowers in a line as the section breaks. This also exemplifies the oppositional nature of softness and bluntness of the piece as a whole—Soong does this in very intentional methods that if it were to be unintentional, it would be very telling of the complexity of the emotions she is experiencing while crafting her work.

​There is no incorrect way to depict Soong’s words and by this I mean, the conversational nature of her words are so inviting that they can be applied to a variety of situations. In her message to the reader, she writes, "Everything I have previously written I renounce. Those poems matter little to me now. They bore me and don't even embarrass me. ...Should this, with its enclosed contents, one day meet its same fate, I will have the necessary act in mind."

Soong embodies, through her words, the belief of moving forward and never looking back, moving through the pain and the love, moving through the ups and downs, moving through passages of time and of life—authentic. She lives authentically through each piece until the very last line of the collection. While Suede Mantis / Soft Rage is a monologue of her thoughts and a lesson to move on, because there’s no purpose in dwelling on the past. ​