By Pichchenda Bao

Let Our Bodies Change the Subject, Jared Harél’s latest poetry collection, is an invitation to reckon with what it means to steward life, your own as well as others’, to hold on to its preciousness while also taking stock of its dear costs. It calls to mind Emily Dickinson’s exhortation to “tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” The language and the subjects of Harél’s poems are plainspoken and familiar, yet the truths they hold have the power to devastate.

Consider the first line of the first poem, “Sad Rollercoaster”:

              My daughter is in the kitchen, working out death.

Harél situates us first with his daughter, establishes kinship in the kitchen, that place of nourishment, labor, and loaded emotions. The sentence is matter-of-fact and utterly relatable until we get to the word, “death,” that lightning strike of truth. Even in the comfort of a kitchen, even with a beloved child, we face mortality. This movement between ease and confrontation, this “working out” of being human, will carry on throughout the collection as Harél takes us through the various places and phases of his life as a son, a husband and a parent in the 21st century in the U.S.

However, the next lines in the poem keep us curious, rather than saddened. In a way, Harél unnames/renames death through his catalogue of what his daughter knows about death. Death becomes “some glittery gold sticker,” “rumors,” a launched “curse.” A grandpa and Dr. Seuss seem to be beyond the bounds of death in that they continue still to be experienced in a particular way, and then an animal skull at the zoo prompts this line:

              […] It’s just for show, I explain.

              explaining nothing. […]

Harél’s particular strength is in capturing these mundane moments of parenthood and revealing their extraordinary stakes. How often do parents use throwaway lines like this, and how much does a child, because their parent is their primal source of knowledge, glean from it? “So silly!” the daughter laughs later in the poem, but we are not entirely uncertain to whom she is referring: herself, her father who asks if she’s okay, or the bones in her dreams.

In the title poem, “Let Our Bodies Change the Subject,” Harél writes:

              I have no good response

              to ruthless transformation, and so it hangs there

This might be the central standpoint of the collection. What would a “good response” to such a thing even be? Harél’s poems travel through different locations and time periods, through different generations, and yet are all suspended inside the search for the right words.

This collection has been called a secular prayer. Another of Harél’s strengths is the musicality of his language. These poems are lovely to recite and listen to. They could well be prayers of the people, to the people. However, I think of these poems more like trail markers. Each of us readers on our own embodied journeys, and these poems registering common points along the way to the truths that must dazzle gradually, lest we be overcome.

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Pichchenda Bao is a Cambodian American poet and writer. Her work has been published by Cultural Daily, Poets of Queens, the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and support from Aspen Words, Kundiman, Bethany Arts Community, and Queens Council on the Arts. She lives, writes and raises her three children in New York City. More at http://www.pichchendabao.com.