Carlos Novoa Reviews House Work by Cindy Juyoung Ok

Cindy Juyoung Ok teaches undergraduate creative writing, has poems published in journals like The Nation, Poetry, and Black Warrior Review, and is a MacDowell Fellow, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize winner, and Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship finalist.

House Work is a chapbook of twenty-seven pages. Deceptive in its smallness, it powerfully evokes isolation and estrangement from its opening, explores ideas of permanence, survival, dependency, connection, and intimacy—and leads us through an examination of language and the Self. The speaker, feeling locked in, smothered and stagnant, is forced to examine their own state of living.

The poems in this collection are vivid and vulnerable. Ok’s command of the language allows for word play that, while used sparingly, rewards the reader that takes the time to look beyond the instinctual.

Masterfully composed, Ok’s House Work is, in one word, domestic. It opens with the image of the speaker and the subject rising from bed. However, to say that it is domestic is not to say that it is warm. The speaker and subject “leak / out of bed as you stretch your books and I mine / the frozen language for olding hands day by week”—the “Work” in House Work becoming severely apparent.

It is also the spaces between the lines that Ok uses deftly. Telling the subject: “You are a garden / snake families leave / out and I the rattle / one mine called in / about”; that the speaker has “given up the oval logic / of the archive and you / your cigarettes.” The meanings are not buried, they are simply fragmented, then expanded upon. Truths built upon each other.

Though House Work plays heavily with domesticity, it does not limit itself to the physical home. The poems extend the definition of home far beyond the four walls of the literal home: we’re taken carefully from the house to the neighborhood to the country—we explore the sense of belonging (or lack thereof) we experience in society and with those around us. The speaker is forced to reckon with the fragility of these relations: How different, how separate can two things be and still belong?

The answer, the speaker seems to think, is not very. The speaker’s sense of languor and restlessness permeates every poem in this collection. It is an oppressive weight of placelessness and estrangement that the speaker communicates to us. It is isolation and distance that is emotional and physical, which one is more than the other is for each of us to decide. Emotion is not simply the subject of House Work, it is the foundation on which it is built.

The speaker is, however, incredibly lucid, aware of the dynamics at play around them. It is this lucidity and honesty that allows for the exploration, the excavation of the speaker’s Self and their desires. At a critical moment: “I wanted / to be the close of desire. To be the object of some / verb.” The speaker wanted to be desired, to be the object of some verb they never specify; possibly: wanted, accepted, known.

House Work highlights the connection between place and the Self, belonging and identity. Ok writes, “my country / provides an illusion of synthesis, as my landlord supplies / a fantasy of individuality.” The speaker confronts the truth that their sense of who they are—and who they are with—is, at once, provided and conditional, leading them to search for the place where identity lives.

Carlos Novoa is an undergraduate student at Arizona State University. Originally born in Seattle, Washington, he moved to Phoenix at a very young age and has lived there most of his life. He enjoys reading, writing, and making music.