Organs of Little Importance

Adrienne Chung’s Organs of Little Importance bears two epigraphs; the first, from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, elucidates her title: “I have sometimes felt great difficulty in understanding the origin or formation of parts of little importance.” Chung’s autobiographical debut endeavors to understand the origins of her organs, both her body parts and her rangy poetic instruments. That all-inclusive inquiry necessitates a constantly modulating style; poem by poem, Organs of Little Importance alternates between frame-breaking experiments and revivified traditions. In the uproarious litany of “Bardo Baby,” she dissects herself at merciless length. “My Jungian analyst says that a part of my heart is dead and this hurts me,” Chung reports, then subjects herself to stand-up anatomy:

Why am I every age at once, each part of my body frozen
     in a different time?
Baby face, grandma hands, toddler butt, teenie tits

The next time Chung considers her “baby face,” she’s working within a sonnet crown’s strictures: “I thought guys / liked features of neoteny, baby-faced / countenance, wide-set Bratz doll eyes.” (Is any synopsis of the male gaze’s imprisonments more concise than that perfect rhyme, guys/eyes?)

Chung revisits England in her second epigraph, which postdates Darwin by a century: “If you want my future, forget my past.” Those undying words—from the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe”—encapsulate this collection’s taut tug-of-war between becoming and trauma, fantasy and reminiscence. Debut poets are seldom so alert to the contradictory senses “my past” can hold: if the past is our deterministic beginning—we are “Cursed to reenact our dozen past lives, / each configured of different fathers, / different mothers, different husbands, wives, / and lovers”—it’s also a wellspring of millennial nostalgia. “I miss the good old days in California, where we ate chicken nuggets and applesauce,” Chung reflects in the prose poem “Y2K.” Those good old days, she knows well, were also an initiation into atmospheric violence: “we shot our arms into the tetherball’s vortex, trapping our fingers against the steel pole, hands pulsing hot and bleeding as we watched the O. J. Simpson trial in class.”