“I have become / the surface between reflections,” Nicole Raziya Fong writes in SUBTEXT. This simple yet striking statement sets up a chain of mirrors that overlay the philosophical on the personal on the historical and even the dramatic. Growing more visually complex with each section – as heading-style text hangs askew, dialogue is encased in black boxes, and columns counter centre-justified sections – the collection vividly encapsulates the difficulty of knowing the diasporic self in a fractured reality. 

The first section, “Neutral Grey,” poses complex questions in clear language – “Is it more authentic to write from / language or from identity?” – alongside reversed, inverted, and therefore unreadable excerpts from the ledger of a mid-nineteenth-century ship that transported indentured workers. Fong strips a history of subjugation of its comprehensibility, and this formal experimentation becomes a visceral rewriting of history that is felt as much as read.  

The titular section defamiliarizes cafés, diners, and offices with the frayed logic and immense significance of dreams. Perhaps in accurate dream-like fashion, the poems feel flighty and veiled, but Fong has outfitted them with companions: characters Adananmus and Preciforous muse on each scene’s meaning in philosophical dialogue-style scripts. Sharing this experience with characters in the work stabilizes the reader in the “Irreconcilable rifts / in my understanding of a person” while allowing Fong to remain true to the difficulty inherent in such questions.

A push and pull between clarity and complexity from a writer attuned to her work’s frequency, SUBTEXT suggests that while differences may not be able to be fully closed, connecting across them is undeniably fruitful.mRb