Separation Anxiety

Separation Anxiety, Janice Lee’s first full-length collection, explores the many ways we cope with the loss of those we love, whether human or animal. Divided into 77 untitled entries (excepting the penultimate poem, “QUIZ / 숙제”), the book works through the heartbreaking immediacy of impending death (“a dying dog is in my arms / & all I can think about is / her shivering body”), and recalls memories that haunt the speaker: “the ghost of my dead mother / eavesdropping as I sob willfully / woefully.” Many poems are a page or two in length, and the most provocative entries seize on ponderous moments that buzz in the brain like kōans on postcards. #38 conveys a sense of loss so acute, it’s almost too much to bear:

beauty disappears
when you decide it so

then, simply blink again

#26 offers humor:

hearing the geese
flying overhead
what I admire most
is how much
they don’t give a fuck

#49 reads simply:

today
I wonder about the labor
of worms

These tidy, pithy poems function like connective tissue, granting space for the grief-stricken speaker’s more meditative reflections. In their struggle to find meaning and to tell their story, the speaker seems to waver between the bargaining and depressive stages of grief, eventually approaching what might be a form of acceptance. But as the speaker endeavors to connect with readers, they also lay bare the limits of any such attempt. Toward the end of the book, the speaker’s desire for emotional distance morphs into a brutal vision of eternity:

dying is living & living is dying & both
are sacred and the worms crawling up my nose
while my corpse rots are sacred
and your bloodied knuckles still beating
against the wall are sacred
and each & every breath is sacred
it never ends
there is no finality to history, no final movement
just the eternal movement of the sun
and your knees scraping across the concrete
as you crawl tirelessly towards the horizon