Oracular Maladies

A book of curses, Oracular Maladies summons an ecstatic performance of divas arriving in glamorous form. The backdrop: Vietnamese tonality, displacement, and reclamation. Cicadas arrive onstage. Cows arrive onstage. An odyssey of someone walking on her knees across an entire country makes a video onstage. This is Terazawa's third poetry collection, a wonder of light upon diacritic marks, layers of breathless music uneasy with its hybrid nature. Contemplating fraught intersections between a mother's language of Vietnamese and craft considerations of Japanese-English meter, Oracular Maladies forms a series of six spoken "scores" mirroring the tonal arc of a musical variety show familiar to the Vietnamese diaspora, "Paris by Night." These poems are like a VHS box set dusted off for the first time after decades. Projective verse and prayers flash across the page. The melodrama receives respect.