The poems in Primal Sketches evolve from Caroline Wong’s own experience as a child born in a small village in China and later immigrating to Canada. We come to understand that this uprooting ultimately shapes these poems, and it is this experience that provides the author with a unique sense of insight and empathy, as she explores the most current concerns of environmental crisis, global conflicts and displacement.

Fueled by our perpetual need to find meaning and purpose in our lives, Primal Sketches is a book that considers how our actions profoundly affect the lives of fellow humans as well as the natural world around us, and how our desire to connect, care, and empathize are constantly interrupted by feelings of insecurity and growing anxiety about our uncertain future in a world that is continually bombarded by global conflicts and environmental crises. However, our determination to carry on provides glimpses of hope amid brutal and unthinkable actions and these bright, tender moments reveal our capacity to learn, understand, and love—the essence of our humanity.

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Apparatus

— for Ann Jones: War Is Not Over When It’s Over

There are doors people kept closed
to block out the cries and screams of desperation
but she opened hers wide

gave the women in our village cameras
to record our daily lives

living under our men’s rules.

Through the apparatus’s sharply focused eye
we slowly saw the darkness
that ground our bodies down like meat

our eyes blinded
our calloused hands and feet tied

tongues cut
like those of our mothers
grandmothers, great-grandmothers.

We were not even good enough
to eat dirt.

From the array of our photographs
we saw for the first time
the daily battles we fought
to survive, feed our children.

From the scars in our throats
words began to bubble.

For the first time in our lives
we dared to open a crack
the door that locked us in.

Magic/Realism

Hummingbird windmills
sonic boom at subatomic range, zeroing in.

Somewhere in the Himalayas a rock loosens.
A climber misses a step, curses.

Minuscule whirlwind barely disturbs the mass
of tubular-mouthed fuchsia drooping in the aftermath

of a drenching September rainfall.
Days have passed since the last time I ventured

out except to harvest the last of string beans, fuzzy
squashes, half-ripe tomatoes, split, green sap oozing

nutrients for ubiquitous fruit flies, wasps
bumblebees, half drunk, clumsy.

Down by the lake I miss the geese
that have taken early flights

south, driven by unseasoned cold.
Three families I watched last summer

raising broods so large in number I feared
how the parents could ever care for them

keep them all safe. My heart broke each time
I tallied the slowly fledging goslings, dwindling…

Chorus of distant honking, closing in.
My autumn mood lifts at the perfect V

of their onward flight, arrowing
a miracle in perseverance and number.