Landlock X

In her debut collection, Landlock X, Sarah Audsley embraces fellow members of the Korean “Adoptee Diaspora”:

So many. Just floating. I wonder if you long
for an unnamed touch or smell, a sense of gnawing
from the inside & if you cannot reach the surface,
then you, dear adoptee, are not alone.
I am lonely, too.

As she investigates her own story, the speaker longs

To build
an ancestral palace
 
To no longer live
inside the silence
             of myself.

From that silence emerges a poetics both pastoral and painterly. The vivid and compressed “Six Persimmons” responds to Muqi Fachang’s painting of the same name, leaping from brushstrokes to the visceral cultural knowledge that has been withheld: the heft of dried persimmons at market, and

                               [….] What is omitted
              in those thick art history books—
         place them in bowls of rice, to keep
                                           from bruising.

Omissions drive this collection as the speaker assembles her past, collaging new documents and information, much of it gathered during a journey to explore Korea, where she shares a meal with her birth father. The collection opens with an image of a letter from him in Korean, the English translation of which Audsley transforms into three separate erasure poems.

Taking ownership of the sparse documentation available to her, the poet paints moons over her own face in childhood photographs placed in a circle over the form “Average Measurements for Korean Children,” which is annotated with birth weights penciled in by her adoptive mother. She also repurposes the term “adoptable” from her original adoption paperwork, with the line “adoptable=lovable=adopted=lovable […]” inserted multiple times over text from the “Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2018.” The same recurring formula, repeated over many rows, bookends an ad for a  “Korean-American Alphabet Sampler Counted Cross Stitch,” which claims to “Celebrate Your Child’s Korean-American Heritage.”

Audsley’s reclamations are also formal as she turns to the Korean Sijo, with a series of eight that ends:

Always those hands keep plucking stars from the heavens,
   make
constellations inside bodies, make more mothers. I see how
   form
& origins are stories—I am all those mathematical distances.