Spirit Extracts by Leng Moua

Leng Moua’s Spirit Extracts chronicles a young man’s journey to the land of his Hmong ancestors to discover/recover the spirit-tongue of his fathers. These powerful poems wrestle with the dilemma of the second generation Hmong-American caught between two cultures, himself split like the ox horns used in Hmong ritual. Told by relatives that he resembles a grandfather he hardly knew, the speaker of “Calling Them to Come Eat” says, “I am his shared-blood child / extending an unfamiliar legacy / to aliens whose Fathers call me alien.” Alternately raw and ethereal, Moua’s poems are refreshingly unique, each haunting lyric an extract from the spirit world. And just below that noun’s surface lies its meaning as verb: to remove or take out, especially by effort or force. Leng Moua’s poems call to the spirits, those removed from their land by the horrors of war, and those lost to the trials of American life. Attend, reader, and you will hear that call.

–Joshua McKinney, author of Small Sillion

Navigating the embodied and disembodied, these powerful poems offer us a relationship with the ancestors, the practice and fulfillment of ceremony and ritual, a remembrance of war’s past and an acknowledgement of displaced lives in the midst of exile as Hmong people. There is so much rattling and profound language to take in, from the assertion of “My father’s belly sat on his lap like a child” to the visual wonderment of “we are familiar bodies like / grasshoppers, solitary / studying the shape of our wings.” Moua’s offerings of language demonstrate deft care toward imagery, syntactical constructions, and sonic resonances, rewarding the reader with lines like “I am an egg laid on alien banks.” This is the work of a poet on his way to achieving balance and complexity between this world and the next, between ancestors of the past and the ones to come in the future.

–Mai Der Vang