Shouting about inescapable themes
It’s difficult to read Chris Tse’s third collection of poems, Super Model Minority, silently. Just take his titles as examples: the very first, Utopia? BIG MOOD! demands a scream. Karaoke for the end of the world instructs towards singing. Even a few pages before the book’s end, the reader cannot avoid the rapturous wall of text titled BOY OH BOY OH BOY OH BOY. Tse is always dynamic, luxurious, and fun — yet this collection showcases him as a writer of great tonal range. Beneath the effervescence, a reader finds an explorative, calculating, and often angry speaker.
Super Model Minority is openarmed, gracious and gregarious, the opposite of any insular and haughty idea of poetry possibly held by people outside the poetry world. Its poems take inspiration and language from Chinese-american poet Chen Chen, Aotearoa artist and poet Sam Duckor-jones, Carly Rae Jepsen, George Michael, the Cards Against Humanity game, and a bounty of other artists and musicians. Cultural references include mall cops, Korean soap operas and Girls Aloud. This ramshackle backing chorus of borrowed voices adds warmth and breadth to the collection, while also pointing the reader towards the cross section of identity and lyric Tse provides on every page.
The collection’s title is, of course, a clue to that cross-section. There is the excess and shine of the supermodel, melded to the cultural construction of the “model minority”, the homogeneous expectation of Asian immigrants to prove themselves as hard-working and intelligent. In these poems, Tse dissects some of that expectation, alongside the historical and current injustices faced by the queer community.
The first sentence of the book’s first poem reads, “I will use my tongue for good.”
The reader knows the work is charged with responsibility and moral motivation. It takes stamina for a poet to keep this kind of declarative work going over the course of nearly 100 pages, but Tse does it elegantly and buoyantly, injecting a lyrical bounce (“I am not an exorcist — I am a sympathetic/vomiter”) and throwing a handful of stubborn glitter into an explication of racism, as in Wishlist — Permadeath.
Tse uses the “we” and “us” pronouns abundantly throughout this collection, another way of tying his story to those of his ancestors, peers, inspirations and readers. It serves the poems powerfully, it rallies and includes, and yet I think the strongest poems here are ones where the “we” slips away to make room for the “I”. When Tse’s lyricism becomes singular, it is electric. This oscillation between first-person plural and singular is clearest in Portrait of a life: “I believe the seasons of love/will give us our direction/even as they decay/ one after the other and we slip/from our foundations.”
Super Model Minority is a collection about love, brokenness, history and the future, and the celebration and commemoration of all these things at once. These are Tse’s inescapable themes and the book does not shy away from them — including the cyclical violence and marginalisation of the groups with which he identifies.
In this collection’s opening, he tells his reader that there is room for something else, though it may take “reverse engineer[ing] utopia” to find it — and at the book’s close, that potential is still there: “The pattern is whatever you choose to see.”