The Corrected Version by Rosanna Young Oh (review)

Reviewed by: The Corrected Version by Rosanna Young Oh Schneider K. Rancy Rosanna Young Oh The Corrected Version Richmond, Virginia. Diode Editions. 2023. 68 pages. ROSANNA YOUNG OH'S debut collection, The Corrected Version, is multiheaded in its origins and reflections. These poems descend with unflinching eye to feast on the personal and the vulnerable, and through this prism explore the wider contradictions with which a writer of diaspora must grapple. The poems of The Corrected Version are ones of departure and stranding, and consequent metaphysical longing. In a collection that abounds with transportations to faraway landscapes and with Korean mythos, the author's parents and familial figures are lodestones to understanding the frustrations of immigration. Tellingly, in "Erasures," she writes of her father: "his favorite story is the myth of Odysseus" and "Maybe he's erased too much of himself / in his pursuit of a 'life.'" These tensions between the folklore of homeland—a heroic mythos of cultural identity—and the disillusionment of American reality, weighed down by working-class industrialism, are palpable. In "Chrysanthemums," Chŏngju's reverent appraising of the flower is robbed of its beauty in its American context at a respected elder's funeral: "Around them, / the chrysanthemums / waxed for the man / who sold them / door-to-door for more / than half his life." Likewise, in "Picking Blueberries," the manual and existential labor of sorting rotten from salvageable blueberries for reselling at the family store is coolly summarized: "How, how to price them? $3.99 per pint." The reader, however, is left with the undeniable impression of how incalculable it is the way the berries burst when squeezed between forefinger and thumb. Visceral imagery of fruits, plants, and grocery store items haunt the reader throughout this collection like ghosts of the author's childhood, brimming in the aisles of her parents' grocery store. The dripping cut watermelon in "Scene with Watermelon from Hokusai" is a reference to the still life by the Japanese painter, but this flora is also one of the many windows through which Oh understands the American landscape as shaped through the economic conditions of her upbringing. The visions are gripping: in "The Gift," the father, hunched wet-eyed and wet-mouthed over the garbage can eating "a Haitian mango: / all muscle brindled with black and bruises," or the vision of impaled oranges and smashed cantaloupes; the dutiful immigrant daughter "clacking at the register, / the tips of [her] latex gloves black / from rubbing coins and dollar bills"; or the exhilarating and freeing litany of "Creation Narrative," naming the very inventory of fruits, vegetables, and plants that constructs the speaker's recent past and identity. But Oh makes it clear: the grocery store is at once childhood paradise and purgatory. Glimpses of punitive xenophobic disparagements run as a whispered undercurrent, the way a child hiding under the counter may overhear but fail to discern words exchanged by arguing adults. The boy whose laugh "cut [her] through" in "Homework" is echoed in "The Gift" when a customer attacks: "Give this garbage to your children." The shame these remarks are meant to engender are manifest elsewhere, both from the speaker and her parental figures, who reject their current American circumstances as reflective of their true origins. In "At the Bathhouses," the speaker's mother scrubs "until [she is] inflamed / with scratches all over . . . / betray[ing] / an innermost desire: that [she] / glow so bright, no one will know / [she is] a grocer's daughter." During the picking of blueberries, her father's voice, apropos of nothing, "emerges as though from a distance: / 'You were not meant to live this kind of life.'" The speaker in "Medusa" confesses: . . . I unbindmy curly hair, and the ahjummasat my mother's salon know:I am my father's daughter. An error that can be fixed In "Your Lonely Dream," amidst a dreamscape populated with origami dragons, the speaker reflects: "In your dream, you are the artist you want to become . . . / You realize that you don't have to listen to our father / or his accusations of elitism and misanthropy." The speaker intones, insistent: "This melon is from California. / This peach is American." The figure of these poems, harried...