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[REVIEW] “Forms of Drift: Displacement and Its Antidotes in Mai-Linh Hong’s Continental Drift” by Kai Hang Cheang
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on Continental Drift.
Mai-Linh Hong. Continental Drift, Trio House Press, 2026. 108 pgs.
What happens after tectonic plates move apart, as fault lines bring stress into relief? How might this process of geological drift offer a refugee poet a narrative anchor for telling life stories? Vietnamese American scholar and poet Mai-Linh Hong takes up these questions in her debut collection, Continental Drift.
Brenda Hillman
In the tradition of environmental poetry, Hong opens the collection with an epigraph from Brenda Hillman’s long poem “A Geology” (2001), a poem that likens tectonic severing to an addict’s cycles of intoxication and withdrawal. The breaking of plates is not unlike an addict’s tremor: both destroy as much as they create. For the earth, rupture raises new landforms, such as “the Transverse Ranges [that] hold Los Angeles,” which “spit out / a desert on their hazard side” (p. 14); for the addict, it marks the moment a new self emerges, when, in trying to leave, “the desire to make himself over shifts from what it felt like to have been a subject,” unleashing “the extraordinary stranger in our veins” (p. 14). Without glamorising trauma, Hong, too, meditates on how rupture in a mined landscape can become a “new place” (p. 3). In the opening poem, “Delta,” she writes, “like cicadas, we return after thirty years, legs long, bellies full / unlodged from silt remains” (p. 3). The landscape is the once-violent Mekong Delta, and the “we” are refugees returning, after a period of absence, to the country they fled.
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Like Hillman, who does not shy away from dwelling on the stigmatised figure of the addict, Hong is unafraid to offer unflattering images of herself that strategically play with stereotypes of Asians as an invasive species. Alongside the “cicadas,” she describes her Vietnamese as “utterances insistent as weeds / unintelligible to me” (p. 3), a language she speaks but does not fully inhabit. Through such images, Hong’s poems traverse the shifting, swampy terrain she has navigated as a mother, a refugee, and, at times, a returnee, moving towards moments of epiphany and occasionally even finding refuge on drifting ground.
Drift is both the collection’s operating reality and its governing metaphor. In geology, “drift” also refers to the clay, silt, and rock that glaciers carry and deposit, a process accelerated by melting glaciers in the age of climate change. More specifically, continental drift, the phenomenon from which Hong’s collection takes its name, is as old as the continents themselves, though the idea has a shorter history. Observing that the east coast of South America appears to fit against the west coast of Africa, mapmakers and naturalists, from Abraham Ortelius in the sixteenth century to Alexander von Humboldt in the early nineteenth century, wondered whether the lands bordering the Atlantic had once formed a single landmass. In 1912, the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener developed this conjecture into the theory of continental drift, which was vindicated half a century later by plate tectonics. Scientists now estimate that tectonic plates move a few centimetres per year. At that rate, as Hillman (whom Hong cites) puts it, “LA will dwell beside San Francisco eventually” (p. 14).
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Accepting drift, and by extension separation, as a human condition as natural as the irreversible movement of tectonic plates, Hong’s poems actively contemplate antidotes to drift. They do not attempt to conceal separation or the pain and loss it has caused; rather, they offer meditations that guide us towards a semblance of stability on moving ground. As she writes in “Aftershocks,” a poem whose words and lines are scattered across the page, although drifting is the “tectonic terror in the everyday,” the plates both “fracture” and “convene”: “how they language, even if / no one listens” (p. 52). Tectonic drift transforms what we might regard as inanimate objects into subjects endowed with a kind of agency, one that structures the world’s geographical grammar and generates new forms: “mountains, / Earth’s emergent syntax”; “Oceans alleviate/ bury & birth” (p. 54).
Hong delves deeper into this in “Continental Drift (Chesapeake Bay, Virginia),” which opens with the line “Australia is in the process of colliding with Southeast Asia” (p. 9). The poem’s form enacts its subject: four quintains alternate with single-line stanzas, as if fragments were breaking off from larger landmasses and drifting between them. Yet tectonic plates are not the only things that move in the poem. There is also the “unwieldy” “flotsam” that is “almost alive” (p. 9), as well as the refugees with whom “they swim.” Here, Hong maps the Vietnam War’s dispersal of refugee lineages onto her own family, with some relatives ending up in Australia and others in Virginia. She describes this dispersal as a “triangulation of the womb: kinship as a veil drawn thin, pearlescent, across three continents” (p. 9). This scene of familial union, with which the poem concludes, seems to be where comfort gathers. In the final stanza, Hong deliberately returns to the “driftwood” of earlier stanzas: “I ask glow and warmth of all that washes up. // I will it to ignite” (p. 9). I read this moment of illumination as Hong transforming refugee experience into the raw material that fuels her poems, which in turn illuminate that experience and offer warmth to her like-minded readers.
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In the collection’s second poem titled “Continental Drift,” this time subtitled “Merced, California,” after the place where Hong teaches, she portrays a scene of domestic bliss. Its twelve tercets unfold with the steady, even rhythm of everyday routine. With reality TV playing in the background, she prepares her “son’s lunch” (p. 62). Reflecting on the speed at which tectonic plates move, she writes, “Did you know / continents move at the same rate / fingernails grow? I roll turkey with provolone. / I stick colorful toothpicks / in colorful tortillas and hope the children / won’t stab each other in the lunchroom” (p. 62). Motherhood appears to anchor the refugee poet as she reckons with the uncertainties of the world’s past and future, exemplified by continental drift. Hong writes, “We are drifting toward a future not where we imagine because while we migrate / continents do too. And I suppose / the inverse is true, past not where we thought, a half-lifetime ago when we were together” (p. 63). What remains stable, and perhaps eternal, is the idyllic scene of “a blur of hummingbirds / itching to fly at the face of a watching cat” (p. 63). She observes all this while preparing lunch for her son. She describes herself and her son as two islands, “separate” yet “connected islands,” which, without touching, keep “inching” towards each other, forming an “archipelago of restless, glimmering wishes” (p. 63).
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The two title poems in Continental Drift thus demonstrate how shifting geography offers a refugee poet like Hong a metaphor through which to narrate experiences of separation. Moreover, against a backdrop of loss, Hong finds hope in the aftermath of geological devastation. She brings this into sharp focus by reflecting on the open-endedness of drift, whereby continents once joined can move apart, while those once separated can come together. California, where she now lives, is itself such a convergence: much of the state was assembled from accreted terranes, volcanic island arcs, and fragments of crust that drifted across the ocean over millions of years before fusing with North America. In this sense, the ground beneath Hong’s kitchen is part of an archipelago that enables her to make a home and forge kinship. Hong may well have written a collection for our time, one that considers how and where to find small joys and moments of light when shifting climates and political landscapes seem to render them impossible to find.
How to cite: Cheang, Kai Hang. “Forms of Drift: Displacement and Its Antidotes in Mai-Linh Hong’s Continental Drift.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 22 Oct. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/10/22/drift-hong.
Kai Hang Cheang is an associate professor at Portland State University and the author of Sideways Developments: Queer and Trans Aesthetics of Global Hong Kong (University of Michigan Press, 2026). In autumn 2026, Kai is serving as the Muriel Gold Visiting Professor at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University.