The papyrus is a fragile terrain, susceptible to loss through weather and age. Huang’s collection is on a papyrus for the time being, where gaps appear less by disintegration than by degradations of memory. The square brackets which punctuate this collection read like an elegy for what is lost to time and may “never [appear] as such.” It’s no coincidence the collection’s dates range throughout and beyond the shelter in place orders brought on by COVID-19 – a poem set in early 2020 reads like a laundry list of forgotten pre-pandemic pleasures: 

I watch the clock 

placing my hands on you everywhere

…

I go to a lot of parties

hoping I’ll see you there

            often what I remember

            the next day

            is [ 

            ] all the people

            outside [ ] smoking

            …

           someone offers me a drag

Other 2020 events you might have forgotten: widespread wildfires, a poem that relays the heat of early romance “under the smoked-out sun.” Through Huang’s eyes, these memories and fragments, though erased on the page, live on in the atmosphere, in the evaporated substance of history.mRb