Nicholas Wong’s Besiege Me, in contrast to Bennett’s collection, is positively overflowing with proper nouns and references. As a deeply personal and autobiographical portrait of its author, Wong’s poems are constantly tying themselves to real-world things. “First Martyr” opens with a quote from The Guardian on the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong in 2019 and a man who died “after unfurling a large protest banner on scaffolding near government headquarters.” In “Advice from a Pro-Beijing Lobbyist,” the speaker claims, “We care about human rights as much / as we do about the Johnny Depp scandal.” Some poems are direct riffs on other works of art. The long, multi-part poem “Vacuum,” for instance, features sections referencing visual art by Chinese artists. There’s a poem about Grindr, the dating app used by many in the queer and trans communities. In the notes at the end of the book, Wong informs the reader that many of his poems borrow language from sources such as an essay by Mary Ruefle, the early 20th-century short play Trifles by Susan Glaspell, Cantonese Internet slangs, Mark Doty, Adam Zagajewski, and Francis Ponge, among others.
Such a reference-heavy approach captures the many facets of Wong’s existence, which, like all of ours, is steeped in a hodgepodge of pop culture, familial history, personal narrative, and political context. The collection’s best piece, the long poem “City Mess, Mother Mess, Fluids Mess,” is a pastiche of styles, modes, and tones. It’s a complex examination of the speaker’s relationship to his mother, his romantic life, the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, and the melancholy of loneliness. “To fragment,” Wong writes, “is to steadily lay down what memory allows. Fragmenting as drilling, attempting to re-know.” (These lines pair nicely with Bennett’s.) Wong brilliantly contrasts conflicting notions. After describing his mother’s worry that his father “was seeing someone else” with “sorrow so raw that I didn’t know / how to react,” Wong goes back to his participation in the sit-ins:
My heart jagged like an escalator step.
23 likes to my post, Police about to shoot.
When the mouth of a gun points at a face that looks
like the gun holder’s face, it is not hatred but politics.
Wong employs numerous techniques, from multiple choice questions to Venn diagrams to the formatting of screenplays. These usages coupled with his barrage of references accomplish something seemingly contradictory: by constantly shifting and pointing outward to other nouns, the collective result is a portrait of a single person, the way a mosaic is a full image made up of unconnected shards.
“But I can’t kill my home,” Wong writes, “where it feels good for me to be hollow / & hollowed out like the who in whoever.” By the final poem of Besiege Me, it’s as if Wong emerges from this generic who to become a fully realized poet. You feel as if you know him in some essential way.