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There’s a poem in Kristine Ong Muslim’s Night Fish about art, which it is tempting to use as a primer for how to read the poems in this book. “Art” lists a series of definitions of art. These lines delineate “one” meaning for art:

             It has eyes – one busted searchlight after
             another looking for souls at the bottom of a
             water glass.

The conceit, like so many of Ong Muslim’s, spins out in many directions. This one emphasizes that art (and poetry) can be all about perspective, soul-searching, and form.

“Side Vision” begins, “I noticed a soul down the hallway.” Later in this brief, eight line poem she continues the description of this soul: “It was  not even transparent./To understand, it had two hands//to correspond with mine.”  This soul, a kind of twin of the narrator, inhabits a different or parallel world, and is grittily real. The message seems to be that signs of other worlds are all around us if we but look, and that some communion with it is a most natural thing.

In their cadence, some poems, such as “Side Vision” and “House Guest,” suggest Emily Dickinson. Like Dickinson, Ong Muslim’s vision is often oblique. In “Night Fish,” darkness gives the journey (the fishing) a sense of mystery. Ong Muslim’s “village” – the setting for several of her poems and observations – like Dickinson’s lanes, rooms, yards, cemeteries – suggests truths about perceptions of time and death.

“Dream villages” are places where:

             ...the villagers are the people you know
             who are long dead, and they tell you things –
             something about road signs that are no longer there,

This suggests we should be open to learning from the past, our own personal past and a more communal one. The poem continues to describe a dream village where “grass is green and everything.” We’re left with the idea that to interpret a dream is a worthy pursuit requiring meditation and thoughtfulness, and questioning. It’s a way of remembering – the grass really was green, wasn’t it?

After reading this collection I found myself rather obsessively looking at surfaces and trying to imagine what was happening beneath them – beneath photographs, images in artworks, lakes, rivers, images in dreams. You may have this impulse too, and feel that the poet has given you a gift by her words.