Robyn Maree Pickens
Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud by Lee Murray (The Cuba Press, 2024), 136pp, $28, Manuali’i by Rex Letoa Paget (Saufo’i Press, 2024), 92pp, $30; Spoiled Fruit: Queer poetry from Aotearoa edited by Damien Levi and Amber Esau (Āporo Press, 2023), 87pp, $30
All books are larger than the reviewer, but Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud by third-generation Chinese New Zealander Lee Murray is by far the largest this white ghost has had the honour to review. As I read the most gut-wrenching stories—based on factual events—I recalled recent news articles on missing, disappeared, murdered Asian women. The violence meted out to the women in the book and to the women in the news felt disturbingly and decidedly continuous and not remotely historical.
Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud is harrowing, as the truth can be—and relentlessly so when that truth is repressed or not widely known, when there is barely an opening in human consciousness for the stories to be permitted breath. What a gargantuan task Murray has taken on in bringing us these fact-based stories of immeasurable grief, harm and violence wrought on Chinese women both in the Middle Kingdom (China) and in Aotearoa New Zealand. If Murray herself had to drag these stories from dank caves, bruising and scraping flesh and spirit in the process, I would not be surprised.
So we enter Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud and behold therein a highly effective anchoring device: the fox—both narrator and inhabitor of Chinese female skulls—who leads us through each of the nine women’s horrific lives. This is no ordinary fox. Murray describes the fox-narrator as the ‘nine-tailed fox spirit, húli jīng’, an ‘ancestral metaphor’ shapeshifting between the nine female characters across time and place. As Geneve Flynn elaborates in the book’s Foreword, ‘[i]n Chinese mythology, the fox is a liminal creature. Untameable and wild, it dwells in the margins and is neither wholly good nor evil’.
Murray’s fox-narrator, while offering a pause of sorts between each of the nine painful lives, is never gratuitous and never only a device or pivot. For the fox herself develops over the course of the gruelling inhabitations, each one endured and then relinquished on her ascension to the celestial realm. Often, she adds a coda to the life she has just lived and shucked off—especially if it was ended abruptly.
The fox-narrator is a skilled wordsmith who variously utilises language rhythmically and lyrically and uses selective repetition of certain phrases for a lulling storytelling effect. This is intentionally at odds with the wretched lives of the characters. After each life and violent death, the reader is returned to the fox as she wrenches off the skull of the deceased and clutches the spare moments of release before selecting the next skull.
The sequence of the book alternates between fox and female character. In keeping with the nine-tailed hūli jīng, the book is structured as follows: fox ~ girl ~ fox ~ woman ~ fox ~ daughter ~ fox ~ woman ~ fox ~ wife ~ fox ~ mother ~ fox ~ woman ~ fox ~ woman ~ fox ~ girl ~ fox. Preceding this iterative shapeshifting is a poem titled ‘fox girl’, which serves as a precis of key violent subjugations and deaths experienced by the primary diasporic Chinese women in Aotearoa.
Corresponding perhaps to this alternating structure, Murray’s stylistic format engages with a loose interpretation of the haibun form in which traditionally a haiku illuminated a theme or image of the prose it followed. Lyrical prose-poem passages are themselves fragmented and/or embellished by words or very short phrases separated by forward slashes. As with the haiku fragment in haibun, these slashed fragments function as lightning strikes or stilled pond ripples. After one infant girl is murdered, the fox opens the following section with:
‘a stray seed / falls / in my soup’.
The nine females are nameless. Collectively and variously, they did not make it past infanthood, get to finish school, choose partner or occupation, or have any existence beyond bare life. Their lives precluded any meaningful self-realisation. They worked thanklessly in fruit shops and laundries, in tailors and massage parlours. Their domains were circumscribed by both Chinese and Pākehā misogyny and by Pākehā racist misogyny. Their children were often wrenched from them and taken to the other side of the world.
After the fox-narrator interrogates her haste through the nine lives, she realises that her ascension task is to ‘bear witness’ to the nine and the countless untold. ‘You will give these women voice and nourish them with hope.’
Given the somewhat arbitrary act of reviewing disparate poetry books together, I read Manuali’i by Rex Letoa Paget, of Samoan and Danish descent, after Murray’s brave-fox narration, and it was balm. Although Paget dedicates his debut collection to his mum and dad, Murray’s dedication ‘for Auntie’ similarly inhabits the pages of Manuali’i, as if Paget had strung all the goddesses and hero-aunties together as the ultimate anchors. This is borne out early in the eponymous opening sequence of poems in which the speaker conjures matriarchal origins:
tugging at your umbilical cord held
by villages of grandmothers
[and]
………………………………constellations of
…………………………………………………………………mother
cheekbones.
…………………………………………………………………the hull of your
stomach
Manuali’i is a saturation of oceanic gratitude to mythological beings who had a hand in the formation of the world, to the generations of women who gave birth to generations, to Paget’s immediate and extended ‘aiga including his aforementioned mother and rest-in-peace father, and to lovers and friends. Although there is grief and heartbreak, overall, if I had to make reference to film, as Paget does several times throughout this collection, I would invoke and bask in the summer peach fuzz of Call Me by Your Name (2017, directed by Luca Guadagnino).
Spoilt for choice by this book’s sheer lyricism, I have selected two further exemplary excerpts, with the first continuing the veneration of female ancestors:
……………………………………………………….in her eyes he sees his stars
/ a map of constellations left by his nanas / the first night they lay skin to
skin / he invited hers in / knew she was a holy descendant of the muses /
(from ‘THE ONE ABOUT THE SCORPION AND THE FROG’)
[and]
….i put your name in two separate crystals
….and gave you back to saltwater.
….loving you was a holy ceremony
….letting you go had to be done in ritual.
Then there’s:
….i am on my knees in the mourning begging my ancestors
….to take you from me. hands lined in surrender.
….but i still listen for your breath in every tūī.
In these lines and so many throughout Manuali’i there is such openness, generosity and a seemingly unselfconscious sweet earnestness. Which is one reason why this collection feels like balm. It is not sentimental, and Paget does not require the earnest or the sweet to be tempered nor undercut by an unreliable narrator-cynic. Even in heartbreak there is an incantatory pile-up of earnest beauty:
i washed my bones with burnt stones glowing daybreak.
(from ‘MAROON after Taylor Swift’).
While ‘earnest’ and ‘poetry’ are two uncomfortable bandmates, Paget’s original imagery and balanced reverence prevent any slip into sentimentality, as evident in the following excerpt on colonisation from the opening stanza of ‘DONNIE DARKO’:
too many people have
ants in their ears.
the kind that maintain
colonies and protect queen.
Bringing in crafted cadences expressing gratitude, matriarchal reverence, grief and heartbreak, Paget reveals with exquisite subtlety an essential aspect of their identity, which with respect, I leave for the reader to discover. While, in addition to all of this, there is aching humility:
to know your sweetness is to know where you lay and feed the trees.
(from ‘EVERYTHING IS EVERYTHING after Ms. Lauryn Hill’).
As it turns out, Paget is one of 20 LGBTQIA+ and takatāpui poets included in the youthfully fecund anthology, Spoiled Fruit: Queer poetry from Aotearoa edited by Damien Levi and Amber Esau. The anthology is the fruiting body of the web platform badapple.gay. Divided into two sections, Bad Apple, edited by Levi, and Spoiled Fruit, edited by Esau, the trajectory of the collection is one of, well, ripening. Though perhaps not quite as far gone as Abraham Mignon’s (1640–79) fantastically overripe vanitas painting, ‘Still life with rotting fruit and nuts on a stone ledge’ (c. 1670), Spoiled Fruit’s quest and feeling is perhaps to get as close to a late stage of lurid decay and imminent putrescence as possible and still be viable as poetic investigation.
For the most part, the poets are wilfully and unapologetically yoked to the experiences of being in their own individual bodies, traumas and tiny deaths. A notable exception is Fetūolemoana Tamapeau, who, in the two poems included here, engages with the world of mythology and broader philosophical consequences of choices made, as much as with the atomised self and interiority.
Bad Apple to me is like the band Bad Seeds, who are there to uphold and embellish the singer Nick Cave, and I understand the editorial craving to reclaim by way of the abject, the punk, and the bad. It occurred to me, though, that, despite religious edicts relating to Eden and Paradise, not all cultures have a long history of demonising those who dwelt and loved differently; some venerated those holy ones who were destined to bring mystical messages through the corporeal and to interpret the eros of the divine as at once luscious and ineffably transcendent. Holy Apples perhaps? Holy to the core perhaps?
ROBYN MAREE PICKENS is an art writer, poet and curator. She holds a master’s degree in art history and a PhD in English (ecopoetics). Her first collection of poems Tung (Otago University Press, 2023) won third place in the 2024 Laurel Prize, an international prize awarded to the best collection of environmental or nature poetry published each year. She is the Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha University of Canterbury from July to January 2026.
Leave a Reply