Jane Wong’s voice comes off the page like that of a mother’s reading a cautionary story to her children. In her new book of poems, Wong uses her voice to make a point: that, as people, we are like the kudzu vine: we take and we are taken. 

Picture those sprawling valleys covered in leafy green vegetation. So thick and so continuous it all seems so lovely. But know, perhaps sadly enough, that this stuff is dominating the landscape. In all its breathtaking beauty it is just as breathtakingly dangerous, leaving only scraps of nutrients for parasites and the defeated.

Kudzu, or Japanese arrowroot, is the focus of Jane Wong’s new book of poetry, Kudzu Does Not Stop, a melancholy, reflective book about loss, family, and, at times, an almost violent love. We are the kudzu, yet we seek to hold the kudzu at bay, Wong seems to intimate.

She writes in the poem, “Vultures”,

I touch my mother’s face.
She wears her monster with pride.
Outside, someone circles our house with a knife.

The 20-poem book is articulate and accessible. Despite earning an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and continuing her work as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington, Wong is not esoteric or difficult to grasp. The poems are clear, yet full of depth. Her work is subtle and sexy, to boot. She writes, in the title poem,

A man pressed me up against a coat rack
and we went at it. Afterward, I hunched
over a bowl of cereal and looked for the mundane.

In this poem, the narrator, having been taken by an unnamed man, now looks for more to devour. Like a vine cut back, looking healthy now, she aims to take root in what lies ahead. Wong, author of two other books of poetry, Dendrochronology and Impossible Map, is no rookie at this writing game. “Look at me make this forest,” she scoffs.

But, it is clear, that she understands the consequences of creation – that just by showing yourself you are in the light to be attacked. However, this has worked for the kudzu plant, the prevalent thing that it is. For, as we’ve learned before, and as we will learn again, nature always wins.

Jane Wong’s Kudzu Does Not Stop can be purchased here. To read an older poem of hers, click here.