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Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2016.
“Lo Kwa Mei-en’s second collection rings with ‘bravado’s vibrato.’ Her honeyed roar, itself golden and generously gilding, acknowledges an echo’s willingness to submit, and cries ‘Lo!’ instead: clever reverberation in her ‘self-landscape’ as she recites ‘a fable with no phobia.’ Here, the alien non-citizen disassembles the colony by naming its simulacrum of fear in varying degrees of intimacy: the tourist, the migrant, the stranger, the immigrant. This is ‘the futurist’s job.’ In The Bees Make Money in the Lion, the hive serves as metaphor for a postmodern diaspora—to be at the mercy of a swarm, compliant within the biblical irresistible, an actor in a dystopian myth disguised as reality. Lo Kwa Mei-en’s speaker pledges not to nation but to story. Her exquisite execution of form works to mythify this speaker, rendering her super capable.” — Ladan Osman
Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2016.
“Lo Kwa Mei-en’s second collection rings with ‘bravado’s vibrato.’ Her honeyed roar, itself golden and generously gilding, acknowledges an echo’s willingness to submit, and cries ‘Lo!’ instead: clever reverberation in her ‘self-landscape’ as she recites ‘a fable with no phobia.’ Here, the alien non-citizen disassembles the colony by naming its simulacrum of fear in varying degrees of intimacy: the tourist, the migrant, the stranger, the immigrant. This is ‘the futurist’s job.’ In The Bees Make Money in the Lion, the hive serves as metaphor for a postmodern diaspora—to be at the mercy of a swarm, compliant within the biblical irresistible, an actor in a dystopian myth disguised as reality. Lo Kwa Mei-en’s speaker pledges not to nation but to story. Her exquisite execution of form works to mythify this speaker, rendering her super capable.” — Ladan Osman
