In Muriel Leung’s Bone Confetti, the poet writes, “The body, a violin that someone is always fingering.” I am haunted by this line and all that is hidden within the spaces in between. I am haunted by this book as a work of silence, as pain, as loss, as the book written as necessity. I t is a beautiful, difficult and unresolved work of art. Such is poetry. Such is life.

If the work of the elegy is, in part, to mitigate the experience of personal loss by submitting to shared linguistic conventions, then Muriel Leung’s Bone Confetti is a radical reimaging of what it might mean for a poet to mourn. Theatrical, rhapsodic, disjunctive, hypnotic—Leung’s art refuses to rein itself in, settle down, or make itself common, insisting instead on bursting over and over into a “spew flower” of exquisite melancholic oddity. “I know less and less about this world,” she writes, and true to her word, there is nothing mundane to be found in these pages. But of the under- and the otherworldly, Leung is an authority, and her book is an achievement of spectacular prowess and power. 

Bone Confetti houses something else: an activity of mourning. The book does this in place of the other things it could have done. Or housed. It struck the bone of my own heart. It made the words into a bell. And the bell made me stop what I was doing, just as certain events or thoughts or scenes do, and orient to that unexpected, powerful sound. Leung is this kind of writer, whose book makes you want to come up with a new language to describe what a book could be, could feel like, to read. I am grateful for the chance to encounter her work at this time, in this part of the real year.

Muriel Leung’s Bone Confetti is a ravishing fever dream of an elegy that mourns both a mother figure and history. Leung’s poems can be unbearably intimate yet also epic, traversing into the speculative and gothic, as she animates her grief into a macabre and exquisitely haunted underworld much like Osip Mandelstam’s Tristia. In this book of specters, there are so many sonorous, uncanny, and sorrowful lines that inspire me to think and feel as Leung meditates on the politics of mourning and the ineluctable impossibility of happiness. Bone Confetti inaugurates a unique voice that will gain lasting prominence in American letters.