TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

I’ve read a lot of books over the years, and some have fundamentally changed not only the way I write but the way I think. I mean books that broke everything wide open for me, showing me possibilities — in form, and in content — that I couldn’t access before. The shortlist includes C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, Carole Maso’s Break Every Rule, and Clarice Lispector’s The Steam of Life, originally published in Portuguese as Água Viva.

When I think about what these texts have in common, they’re all books that possess a beautiful strangeness. They share a commitment to authenticity, originality, and lyricism. They’re each innovative but not gimmicky, because in these texts, form follows function: risks taken on the page mirror risks taken in content. And though all of these books are prose, they’re some of the most poetic books I’ve ever encountered. The sentences shine, clear and sharp and bright.

Today’s poem impacted me like those beloved texts, with its jewellike sentences and its use of the field of the page.

Articulation of Solace
by Yongyu Chen

We are mothering ourselves.  We are articulating solace for each other. We
are trying

to not fall in love. Write love poems

to not fall in love. 

The fault line between the language of feeling and the language of
catastrophe? We find it. Our common language. Our white world.  We are
trying

to write close to it. Even closer. Closeness

changes. Every poem was once impossible. 

Medieval torture devices. Phalansteries. That’s when it mattered. That’s
when you wrote it. 

Your father’s car speeds up the mountain like an unsent letter and you see
someone dead

in your dream when he is still alive outside it. Aliveness

changes. The kind

of violence that can be taken back. The room

where someone not deadly realized they could care for you and didn’t. Or
did. Now you imagine it emptied. The kitchen

without a sink, windswept, glazed emerald-gold.

You could picture solace only by bright walls, you said. By,  not in.  A
nearness.

We were dreaming about an apartment in the Mesozoic. A meadow on
Neptune.

Thinking. This relationship. Between cold pomegranates and the porcelain
bowl that didn’t break as it held them. Solace. I 

wanted islands instead of worlds. I wanted a new kind of ice. One to hold
on to, lying in bed at noon. Bitter citrus grafting

like lightning onto my neck so I could be orchards as well. As well

as seeds

of thunderstorms.

What’s the point of time if we’re never out of it, knocking at your door, in
landfall, in someone else’s house.

I wanted we,  in the second person. I wanted unimaginable solace, in the
second person. I 

wanted terrifying friends

to love me. You,

carrying away gorgeous bags of treasure every time we meet. Deadlight.
Clearly we were not who we were. Clearly we were not dead. We were not

mistaken. I wanted to look exactly like you.

“Articulation of Solace” by Yongyu Chen from PERENNIAL COUNTERPART © 2026 Yongyu Chen. Used by permission of Nightboat Books.