Fugue Body

“I did not know there was a sound / silence made as it laps at the body’s shore,” observes Bridget Huh in her debut collection, Fugue Body—a book in which the body becomes a site of inquiry: a compositional space of melody, counterpoint, and theme. In surprising and intricately orchestrated poems that range from the lyric to the essayistic, Huh meditates on linguistic and racial identity, considers generational differences in an immigrant context, and recounts the life of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. In doing so, she renders the music of a restless, relentless mind with remarkable candour and beauty. “I want all the violins to shimmer,” writes Huh, “I want them to stand for impermanence.”