In “Superject, Undercommons,” Yongyu Chen pauses to translate a French verb: “Partager—in one word, both divide and share.” Perennial Counterpart, Chen’s debut from Nightboat Books, considers how two people—a reader and a poet, or a poet and their influences—can be held in relation without possession. The collection is dedicated to the poet’s friends, many of whom appear throughout by their initials in poems dated and addressed as letters. A letter is itself partagé: it belongs to its recipient and is, structurally, readable by anyone. It is split before it is received. Another word for this tension, the title suggests, is counterpart.
Chen wrote most of Perennial Counterpart during the pandemic in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “I missed my friends since it was the pandemic, & wrote letters to them,” they told Lucia Kan-Sperling in an interview. During this time, Chen read Michel Foucault’s “Friendship as a Way of Life”—the 1981 interview in which Foucault proposed that what disturbs social order in homosexual relation is less the act itself than the mode de vie that may emerge from it: the unscripted affective forms that “yield intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized” and must be invented.
“Every poem was a place where we could meet,” Chen writes in “Friendship as a Way of Life.” Each dedication—“for Yun Qin,” “for Gabby,” “for Patty,” “for Mo-Jai”—doesn’t acknowledge so much as call a friend by name into a room.
“Theory of Mesh,” originally published in Poetry, opens on a proposition:
There has to be a part of nonpossession that’s still relation.
There has to be a purity without closedness. Purity
almost without consciousness, loneliness, pure energy, a pure
person, S—I hope to sustain always an energy that’s very pure.
Three drawings from Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook, as reproduced in Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold, interrupt the poem: the first single and clear, the second tangled and overlaid with nervous energy, the third cross-hatched—the same calligraphic gesture deepened by degrees. Chen had spent a year trying to write “a Lucie Brock-Broido line but even / longer,” until reading Mei-mei Berssenbrugge revealed that what was materializing was already a Berssenbrugge line. The revelation inverts the Bloomian anxiety of influence: the comfort of finding oneself already held by the hands of poets before. Chen takes from Berssenbrugge a theory of how writing and life move through each other: how a story ripens, as Rachel Kushner writes of Marguerite Duras, toward experience rather than merely recording it; and how one arrives at a line not aimed for, through a friend C’s description of Leonora Carrington’s painting And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur, whose meaning C locates in “everything we see after we look away.” Looking away, a form of seeing. The poem arrives at: “Friendship // as a way of life. // Being-together-alone.” Influence, the poem insists, resists the order of genealogy to exist as love without ownership. Like Klee’s diagram, influence and relation are the same gesture, differently pressured.
A mesh has no center; everyone in it is equally peripheral and held. The book’s longest poem, “Plenum,” tests this theory against experience. Dated “06.12.24, letter to Peter,” it recounts an archive of relation through a night walk in Cambridge: every café table, terrace guardrail, and steeple lit at night holds the imprint of a friend. “& I am happiest when alone & leaning towards others,” the speaker confesses. For pages, the speaker asks a friend to strip away the figures—“Pretend H is not there from your letter. Pretend the Argentine writer is not there, even if his book is”—until what remains is bare: “Here are my fingers, ten of them, one with its tight, sparkling band beneath.” Then, midway: “this summer, this will be the summer I finally can go through with hormones, but it will be fall. / For external reasons, fall.” But the poem keeps the summer alive—the friends hold the season open through the act of address.
Paul Celan enters the mesh in “Ithaca-Thiais,” which takes its epigraph from “Große, Glühende Wölbung”: Die Welt ist fort, ich muß dich tragen. Pierre Joris translates this as “the world is gone, I must carry you.” Chen’s poem draws on the line’s urgency to carry relation: “through it all / the middle ligament grew. It was growing the whole time. It grows in the background, in all backgrounds. It grows. / It chains us in a thread that contracts.”
Ingeborg Bachmann shadows the collection from its opening epigraph—a passage from “The Thirtieth Year” that ends in imperatives: “Then be different, so that the world shall change.” She resurfaces in “Nessuno (Not One),” where Chen reads her in German while their body, in the same season, begins to transform:
My breasts grew & the bed held them. I wore
the necklace on the rain day & my scarf wrapped above it & the neckline of my shirt was below it & my sweater, too large, further below—
four lines, each in its stratum, broke. And clouds entered the conduit.
The body has arranged itself in horizontal strata—necklace, scarf, neckline, sweater—and at the moment of change, the layers break, all at once, along their seams. “The bed held them”: a plain act of total reception. The friends hold. Address persists when the shared world withdraws. The dead are here alongside the living—Bachmann, Duras, Bolaño, Celan—encountered in quotation and dream. Death does not break the mesh.
In Celan’s late “Mit der Stimme der Feldmaus” (“[With the voice of the fieldmouse]”), from Schneepart, the absent dead return as the voice of a small animal, biting through cloth to flesh. Chen’s “Mouse Song” is set in Saxony, the habitat of German fairy tales, and it floods. The rodent, as an uncaptured voice, persisting through margins, moves between the two poems as counterparts, but its direction reverses. Celan’s fieldmouse gnaws upward toward the living; Chen’s mice smooth “the passage of blank hooves into heaven.” Where Celan’s rodent interrupts the speaker’s words to the dead, here the mice constitute the words themselves; the speaker invites us to join: “Sing with me, sing with me the mouse song. . .” Against the warmth of “Friendship as a Way of Life,” “Mouse Song” insists on ferality: “You are not a streak of grease on a larger tongue, my long, loose children. You are unstuck.” Chen assumes Bachmann’s imperative to “be different” at a mouse’s scale, the breathing pace at which becoming-different proceeds, inside a body that must go on.
“I never imagined we wouldn’t be friends,” the speaker says in “Pendulum.” By the final pages, the line is no longer wishful: the friends’ presences remain in the room. The counterpart is the figure who keeps returning—perennial—in different bodies and tenses across a writing life.
The final untitled poem closes: “I have built the labyrinth. / I am coming to you, other.” Partager, once more: the book is the labyrinth divided into corridors, shared by all who walk it, but walked alone.
