In her collection Slipstream, Diana Cao covers numerous themes: love, loss, longing, grief, family, parent care, illness, ghosts, family trauma, identity, migration, beginning in a new country, belonging, and even AI and robots, all within 50 pages of poetry. She takes readers on an odyssey around the globe and over the US through tender questionings about connection, community, and desire. Coming from a family of migrants myself, I often listened as a young child to older family members telling stories about adapting to a new country and language. Cao’s collection feels like a dialogue about those experiences. At each turn, her poems remind readers that there are multiple facets of the self, like pieces of a puzzle fitting together or not at all, while questioning the self about what belonging looks like.
Cao’s collection opens, a bit paradoxically it can seem, with a poem about the risk of loss of the father and the very next one about migration of the mother. Readers are drawn into the narrative and land on “The Arrival” of the main narrator and voice of the collection: “...family on the other side of the world. I am the same age now as she was then. How can I say how it feels to arrive?” Readers accompany the narrator throughout the collection as she tries to address this universal question. Central to the collection too are questions about what home and identity mean: “I thought that was the story of Persephone, bound to Hades on one side, her mother on the other.”
Previously, I ran programs to help colleagues address workplace bias. Individuals would discuss personal stories, and as offices, we’d explore through dialogue how to promote being seen and heard so everyone could feel accepted for who they were. Cao makes poetry from inclusion, sharing her own very relatable experiences. The collection brings to the forefront the types of ‘othering’ dynamics which lead to feeling pushed aside or dismissed. The collection demands to be seen and heard, allowing readers to feel heard too as they relate to Cao’s depictions of the impact of being left behind.
“I wish I could drag each day
behind me like a weighted blanket. But
in the yard, one tiny rabbit leaps over
another and newly leafed branches slash
at my windows. I’m afraid of what it means
to be left behind...”
Her collection speaks directly to readers about how exclusion feels, readers can relate to the narrator’s feelings of being left out through experiences of their own. ‘Sick Days: Sonnet Corona’ takes readers through ghosts of family history and family present, while exploring the many unanswered questions of the past and future. “How many people have walked through these walls? I joke about the ghosts when they haven’t said a word to me.”
Cao very skillfully brings in all types of ghosts that we can become to ourselves and other people when we feel alienated. In her poem, ‘Relational, Or Instructions for Going On’, Cao draws on ephemeral images to portray the weight of distance and the impact it had in the loss of community that was once her family’s: “Cigarette smoke after reminded me of my uncles, reminded me that uncles existed, in some version of home where no one expected us back.” As a migrant myself, this line breaks my heart. We as human beings can feel historical, societal, and cultural attachment to people who don’t share in the same attachment and to places where we don’t find room for ourselves anymore.
The poem, “The Moon Lady”, deftly describes this alienation from the perspective of distance, though juxtaposed with closeness, using the duplex structure.
“My shadow stains the moon. Will I return to Earth?
Everything looks brighter here, but not as clear.”
Cao doesn’t leave readers hanging on feelings of loss and alienation. She doubles back full circle, learning from a family’s past to shape a future. In ‘Love Poem for Bood X” Cao tells us, “take your time/growing in soil rich/with the bodies/that came before you./Make the days last/until they’re done.”
In subsequent poems, Cao tells us that there is room in the world for everybody: “But spring/is green exploding/bright bright bright”. In the final poem of the collection, Cao reminds us that fitting in, belonging, and finding acceptance can first mean accepting and loving yourself, being active and alive, it is a continual action: “the quiet in me is like the quiet in you. I think I’m looking for the word still.”
Cao’s is a gem collection, brimming with vivid imagery, evocation, and movement where readers begin with her experience of loss and longing, dialogue on identify, and finish with finding acceptance with her and for ourselves, finding love, finding ourselves moving forward in the world around us. Cao’s is highly recommended reading for today’s current context of continual crisis and isolation.