Down River with Li Po by Karen Pierce Gonzalez
Black Cat Poetry Press, 2025
Down River with Li Po by Karen Pierce Gonzalez is a gorgeous chapbook collection of 30 poems that asks readers to immerse themselves in the liminal space between the longing for a destination and the unexpected joys of the journey itself.
The collection begins gently, guiding the reader with the first poem, “On the bank.” Pierce Gonzalez literally and figuratively grounds the collection with this title and an introduction to Li Po, a Chinese poet from the 8th century BCE, as he contemplates the quiet beauty of his surroundings and everyday life. It is here that we first feel the desire for elsewhere:
My face presses against the willow woven blanket of time between us; at just the right angle it is porous. I’m sure our lives once crossed.
Every poem in this collection works to add color and glow to the subtle details while allowing the reader to glimpse moments and events through the lenses of history, dream, and memory. Within the haibun, stanzas, and beautiful turns of phrase, Pierce Gonzalez weaves a yearning to see, discover, and explore as she flips between meadows and main streets, reaches for connections between stars, and peers into the underside complexities of tree leaves.
In one of my favorite poems, “Winter,” Pierce Gonzalez examines how one can ache for summer in the midst of snow, yet still find solace in the present: “Dim starlight softens / my longing for lilac; / summer scent so far away.” In “Mountain dream,” she wanders in the ephemeral spaces between sunset and sunrise: “I climb a peak / to reach / dusk’s skyline. ”In “Merlot with the Moon,” she examines the heavens:
Patchwork planets and constellations
climbing Sea Goat
stringed Lyra
barking Big Dog
pieced together with irregular threads
of light above me.
Throughout the collection, birds flit in and out of the narrative as they carry out their own separate migrations, boundaries and flight paths differing. As the collection nears the end, one such bird stands out: the “thick-bodied turkey” who, while he does not fly, still finds joy in a puddle by his home in “Early summer rain,” reminding us that there are things to discover right here where we are. Although we must honor the desire to seek out our world, we mustn’t miss what we already have.
There is an undercurrent of movement throughout the work, a constant pull to move onwards or towards. Poems break form and not all landings are peaceful, but they never lose the desire to bring little revelations to the surface. Perhaps, as the reader encounters each poem, gets closer and closer to the end, it is an exercise in practice. Beauty is in the journey, and that is what helps us bridge the distances between where we are and where we will go.
–
Jenny Wong is a writer, traveler, and occasional business analyst. Her debut chapbook is Shiftings & Other Coordinates of Disorder (Pinhole Poetry, 2024). She resides in Canada near the Rocky Mountains, where she makes short poetry films and plans her next adventures.