Yuting Wu

Be My Mirror Yuting Wu

Yuting Wu's (Be My Mirror) unfolds one woman's experiences of lockdown with dreamy, surreal logic. Isolated in a quarantine facility during a global pandemic, Wu's speaker's confinement propels her into recollections and examinations of her personal agency in relation to a series of "you's"-anxiety, lovers, friends, and illness. Each day of quarantine unleashes image-driven free associations and floats the reader through dreams, highs, and memories as the speaker untangles herself from the constraints imposed on her: "You forced me to be who I am, you glued mirrors to my hands. My eyes were pulled out and stuffed back in, only backwards. I closed off the outside world, I started seeing what I thought." And as Wu's speaker unravels her thoughts and examines each brilliant fiber, meditations on time, selfhood, relationships, and the body emerge: "Gasping for air, "was" turned to "is."/ Enamored, / it is/ a feast/ on my body, / not on my mind." Wu's poems are; they exist in an ever-present now in which spirit and matter converge, in which "I was trembling and/ you placed your cheeks against/ my cheeks/ and wood smelled like wood/ and red smelled like yellow/ and you died as you." This collection pulses with an urgency to capture moments of encounter between self and other before they slip away: "I . . ./ try to weave the threads/ and write down the words/ before my dream of you/ is buried alongside you." And with each turn of the page, she mediates her own selfhood through ar