On Jeopardy last night (via the YES TV - the Mississauga-area based channel which shows reruns on the week-ends), there was a contestant who had a strange grin and who would shake her head every time she got to answer an "answer," which thankfully wasn't often.
Left: Jonathan Fisher: Coral Gables, Florida - Actor
Center: Aline Dolinh: Allston Massachusetts - MFA Candidate
Right: Ray Kmball: West Point, New York - Retired Army Officer
Dolinh was introduced as an MFA student in poetry (Master of Fine Arts). I was sure she would have a web page with her poetry, and I wasn't wrong.
About Dolinh, from her website:
I’m a current MFA candidate in poetry at Boston University. Some of the subjects I’m particularly interested in — as both a student and writer — include the ongoing construction of Asian-American identity; the relationship between the beauty industry and technologies of surveillance; and the way that our cultural understandings of female mysticism, sexuality, and “monstrosity” in the medieval world have continuing implications for our understanding of modernity.
I was also Bitch Media’s 2019 Writing Fellow in Pop-Culture Criticism, a 2015 Poetry Mentor for The Adroit Journal’s Summer Mentorship Program, and a 2013 National Student Poet representing the Southeast.
And from one of the links she provides (BitchMedia):
I’m a writer and current undergraduate student at the University of Virginia, where I’m pursuing majors in English and Medieval Studies (don’t get me started on visionary female mystics) and a minor in art history! I’m also a second-generation Vietnamese-American, and as a critic I’m really interested in exploring how Asian women are represented in coming-of-age narratives and speculative fiction. Some of my favorite films are Black Narcissus, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Kiki’s Delivery Service, In the Mood for Love, and The Handmaiden.
Multiculturalism and modernity have finally joined hands (they have already for decades now), but this time with "blades" - to better slash throats with.
As is her poetry, that is filled with flashes of violence.
Here is an example.
Self-Portrait as Ending of a Wuxia Film
This time around, I'm dying in a gown the color of arterial blueberries within the perfumed sphere of winter. The monk I'm sworn to protect confesses that he's been impossibly fond of me the whole time. The open gouge on my belly looks as inviting as a halved pomegranate. I always longed for that kind of romance, you know? The breathtaking constancy of the way a beautiful woman with a moon-colored throat is always swooning bloodred, her cheekbones luminous in a pool of blades.
The "self-portrait" of course is not her, but a medieval female character, a nun. The rest is clear.
Here is the first lines of another,
I have recurring nightmares in which I am
a girl in twelfth-century Provence. Upon my
pronounced refusal to marry, my parentsdecide to ship me off to a nunnery,...
Lihn professes that she is "catholic," but nothing she writes about or posts on her various sites shows her loyalty to this faith. Rather, her obsessions are: white females, or envy thereof, mysticism and a search for spiritual satisfaction, and lesbian-themed television programs.
She tell us: "Some of my favorite films are Black Narcissus, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Kiki’s Delivery Service, In the Mood for Love, and The Handmaiden."
