Continuous Frieze Bordering Red
By Michelle Naka Pierce
Selected by Elisabeth Frost
Continuous Frieze Bordering Red documents the migratory patterns of an Other, as she travels between countries, languages, seasons, and shifting identities. A narrative on hybridity, the text explores [dis]location as a cultural swerve while it interrogates Rothko’s red: his bricked-in, water-damaged windows [floating borders], which reflect unstable cultural borders to the hybrid. A person of mixed race [hybrid, mongrel, mutt] traverses these “invisible” cultural borders repeatedly. Border identity comes with flux, instability, and vibrational pulls. An Other is marked as someone who does not belong. She is always a foreigner: when traveling and when at “home.” She is cast aside, bracketed from the dominant culture. She is [neither][nor][both]. She exists in a liminal space: in place and displaced simultaneously. That is, her identity and body are peripatetic, which is reflected in the continuous horizontal frieze. The reader must literally cross the borders of each page in order to navigate each line of text, leaving the reader in constant motion as well. The poem also functions as an ekphrasis of Rothko’s Seagram murals: Rothko writes that the paintings make the observers “feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up.” The hybrid is confined and isolated. Even though the Other is estranged from herself and desires a sense of cultural belonging, she ultimately wants to “acknowledge this scar tissue and proceed” so that she is not held to false measures of “purity.” Continuous Frieze Bordering Red attempts to move away from pejorative definitions of “hybrid” and embrace the monstrous self.
Continuous Frieze Bordering Red is a tour de force. It is inviting, exciting, immediately accessible and so elegantly turned that it's inevitable, like an equation that generates infinite possibilities in a just-discovered universe. —Drunken Boat
. . . An absolute joy to keep turning the pages, to stay in motion with Pierce, to be always already moving/across.
—Asian American Poetry Unbound
"Inspired in different ways by Mark Rothko and Judith Butler, Pierce contemplates what it feels like to be outside of her skin. Her speaker moves through bodies—both literal and figurative—and Pierce seems to pose the question: If each part of your identity can be disassembled, can the self, the identities we place and take off like clothes, also be put back together again?
—The Brooklyn Rail
"Interruptions mingle with saturations, private intensities with social commentary, lyric apercus with skeptical suspicion—this multi-track work by Michelle Naka Pierce correlates many streams of insight and produces elegant and self-assured results."
—Rachel Blau DuPlessis
"The work's innovative form unfolds in time and space, encouraging both horizontal and vertical reading, opening up a new space for hybridity that is "Not directionless: polyvectorial." —Timothy Yu