Clickbait Review: Kathleen McClung’s A Juror Must Fold in on Herself

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Kathleen McClung’s chapbook A Juror Must Fold in on Herself couldn’t have arrived at a better time for this sequestered reader, a juror in her own right. Several months into quarantine, interfacing with an unjust country from semi-permeable safety of my own solitude, I was turning in on myself, much like the sequestered juror of McClung’s bounded universe writing form poem after form poem. McClung writes in “Superior Court Ghazal,” “okay, so I may be over-/thinking here, but that’s what goes on in our little box.” At this point in time, who isn’t overthinking from her little box?

Some infinities are larger than others, but from where I’m sitting this still means that our small universes are infinite. If free verse is a large infinity, form poems are smaller ones. A villanelle, with its two repeating lines and strict rhyme scheme, seems restrictive, but the eternal lies here too. As poets know, no repetition is the identical. We cannot say the same thing twice. There is freedom to be found in restraint, and if we fold enough times we will soon be ten miles high. 

This brief collection, restrained as it were, shifts voice poem by poem, from the District Attorney to the Public Defender to the Forewoman. Mostly we stick with the perspective of the Sequestered Juror, though, who figures in many forms: a rondeau, a pantoum, a sestina, a cento, a lament. She attempts time and again to order the tragedy at the centre of the book--what justice might be done about the death of a child--as though by organizing she might make sense of the senseless. We catch mere glimpses of the juror’s personhood; only small pieces of her life unfold: her mild attention to the “lanky prosecutor who doesn’t wear a ring,” her affection for her dog Alegria, her literary inclinations. We learn practically nothing of the defendant. 

The chapbook meditates on voice, how difficult it is to restrain our voices, how many of our voices are restrained by society. From the very first poem, “Field Notes, Hall of Justice Parking Lot,” the juror longs to talk with the defendant but must not, for fear of being held in contempt of court. The Public Defender claims of the defendant, “his silence is his right” and later, “his silence is his choice,” though it does not seem like a choice. Meanwhile the Public Defender claims, “but me, I talk a lot,” and it’s unclear whether or not he is pleased with his own speech. An entire poem is composed of notes the juror does not write down; the poem is negative space, an absence, what could have been but was not, was held back. In the cento, she writes, “There are no words in our language to say this,” and yet what follows must certainly be the “this” she is saying. In the lament, speaking is one activity among a list of actions the jurors must not make. In the end, the juror prints her verdict on paper, and ultimately only the Forewoman speaks. At every point there is tension between silence and speech; a poem is never entirely one nor the other. A Juror Must Fold in on Herself builds the infinite into each small box. 

All these meditations on silence, all these linguistic explorations of restraining the voice, all these foldings in on herself, open up into a sonnet crown ominously titled “Summons,” where the narrator seeks advice from her late grandmother, a courthouse stenographer, on how to conduct her legally imposed silence. Here it is the narrator who speaks, despite her enforced silence, while the grandmother, called on for advice, remains silent. Here we truly meet the narrator for the first time, see the fuller fabric of her life intertwined through her grandmother’s, and we see in parallel the humanization of the legal proceedings. The play of the title, the narrator invoking the presence of her dead ancestor and the court requiring one’s presence, emphasizes this entwining.

Though the grandmother does not give advice, the collection ultimately does, ending on two sonnets titled, “Advice for the Ghost Ship Jurors,” addressing the fire that broke out in an artists’ collective in Oakland in 2016 and killed 36 people. These final poems emphasize the jurors’ humanity in the face of mass, senseless tragedy. As readers trapped in my own small boxes, perhaps enduring forced silences of our own, these final poems serve as reminders that we are jurors of mass, mass tragedy. They urge us to expand. While this collection may resonate particularly well in our time of quarantine and a renewed social awareness of injustice, irreconcilable tragedies are a permanent feature of our lives, and McClung’s treatise with these poems is that we must not lose our humanity when we respond to them, and we must never descend into silence.

Learn more about McClung and her work here.

Written by Anna Winham

Travel Around the World During Self-Quarantine

Written by Yunqin Wang

As the pandemic ravages the world, my plans to travel to Seattle, Wyoming, Austin, as well as back to Asia seem to have been postponed indefinitely. Looking back the past month, I realize that the only trip I’ve made was a 10 minute walk to the closest grocery store. Yet, within that 10 minute, I found I was feeling upset about not just the prospect of not being able to travel, but also I miss the “city” so much -- the New York bustling with life, news and videos of events happening all over the world. 

Thus, I thought this would be a good time to recommend some of my favorite films about other places and times -- since why don’t we take this time to just give ourselves a temporary escape? Or, more realistically, to decide the next city we’d love to land on?

New York, USA  - Frances Ha (Film) 

As the name suggests, Frances Ha tells the story of Frances Halladay, a 27-year-old apprentice dancer who lives in New York. Her life is upended when her roommate decides to move out, and she finds herself unable to afford the rent alone and has to find new places to live. She moves to Chinatown and shares an apartment with two other friends, and at the same time, keeps struggling in her dance career. Although filmed in black-and-white, Frances Ha has always been one of my favorite New York films as it portrays the life of young dreamers in the city so movingly. Through the picture and the amazing soundtrack, I keep getting reminded of the bustling energy of the city, and what’s more, some of the most amazing human interactions which I sometimes think could only happen in New York.  

Paris, France - Before Sunset (film)

“But you have to think that Notre Dame will be gone one day.” This film made in 2004 almost made a prophet of the heartbreaking Notre Dame fire. Opening inside the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore, Before Sunset invites us to go on a tour along Marais district of the 4th arrondissement, to a French cafe, then the Promenade Plantée park, and finally on board a bateau mouche from Quai de la Tournelle to Quai Henri IV. The process of the production was almost like planning the most romantic touring route in Paris -- a route that closes “before sunset”. Wouldn’t it be nice to travel back to Paris in the early 2000 again — the time when Notre Dame was still intact — and to be bathed in music and sunlights?

Hong Kong, China - Made in Hong Kong (film)

Part of director Fruit Chan’s “1997 Trilogy” which celebrates the reunification of Hong Kong, Made in Hong Kong centers around Autumn Moon, a low-rent triad living in Hong Kong. With his encounter with a girl who committed suicide, he starts his journey of finding meaning in his hopelessly violent existence. While the film is considered as a low-cost independent production for it is made from lots of left-over film reels, I found extreme authenticity and a sense of realism in the picture. We see streets of Hong Kong, stores along the street, absurd but moving life stories… To me they are not only an intimate portrait of Hong Kong, but also a symbol of the anxiety people were facing back then — an anxiety and insecurity that could be universal. 

Venice, Italy - Death in Venice (book/film)

As our protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach, travels to Venice for health reasons, he becomes obsessed with a beautiful boy named Tadzio who is staying with his family at the same hotel on the Lido as Aschenbach. With Gustav’s arrival in Venice, we soon hear the water, see the gondola, begin to embrace the sand and the ocean. There is calm in Venice: the waves, winds, delicate meals. There is passion too: music and festivals in the hotel, men and women lying on the beach. There is certain pain, as the problem of health penetrates throughout the story, and yet there is more importantly, love and beauty. While I was reading the book, I was constantly reminded of Keats’ poem, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. How I want to be in Venice, and feel the summer breeze bringing all those beautiful scents and life to me. 

Buenos Aires, Argentina - Happy Together (film) 

My all-time favorite film by Wong Kar-wai, Happy Together is about a couple who comes to visit Buenos Aires hoping to renew their relationship. In Buenos Aires, they took a road trip to the Iguazu Falls, but on the road, went into an argument and broke up. They thus came back to Buenos Aires and stayed there for a while separately. Throughout the screen, the agony of love interweaves with the tango, the music, the colorful nights of Buenos Aires. While watching, I can’t help but call Buenos Aires a true city of passion. I don’t want to spoil the film, but by the end, we will get a glimpse at the sublime Iguazu Falls, and what’s more, also arrive at Ushuaia, the south-most part of Argentina which bears a breathtaking view. Happy Together tells a journey from the most vigorous Buenos Aires to the cold end of the world, and at the same time, a journey of two lovers.