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Leanne Dunic, Wet, Talonbooks, April 2024. 133 pgs.

Interwoven throughout Wet, Leanne Dunic’s most recent book named as one of the 37 poetry collections the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recommends reading this spring, are her thoughts and feelings about economic inequity, the world’s apathetic response to climate crises, and its inaction to end environmental degradation. She wonders if a reconnection, or reconciliation, with nature is possible. She exposes the loneliness of modern cities and individuals living in them who struggle to be respectfully seen, loved, aroused, and desired. How does the world respond to what societies have done and are doing? What happens when intimacy is withheld? Where do we seek it? What actions affirm that you, and this earth you inhabit, matter?

A privileged royal leaves her prince and palace to live in the countryside on a mountain. A Chinese American woman of modest means leaves North America for Borneo and Singapore, looking for better-paid work as a model. These are transformative decisions for the two young women we meet in Wet. At 133 pages, Wet is a poem epic in length, powerfully cautionary, a hybrid blend of fantasy, fiction, memoir, lyric, and street photography.

Snow is young, married, and wealthy, a fairy-tale princess with a charmed life she has just rejected. Instead, she chooses to live alone in a wintry landscape, surrounded by a self-sufficient wildness, which she longs to experience and connect with.

Another woman, an art school graduate, is shouldering substantial debt. She leaves the American Northwest as an economic migrant, going to prosperous Asian cities under contract with an international modelling agency.

Snow has the time, means, and self-awareness to seek insights into her existence, and her relationship to the natural world. One of the mountain’s denizens guides her in her quest for meaning, resulting in a denouement that is both unexpected and uncannily just.

The seedy apartments and tropical city streets the contracted model finds herself in are described unflinchingly. We can smell, hear, and see the pollution, the dirt, the scavenging of insects, the street lives of cats, pigeons, and people. We see through the model’s eyes ill-paid domestic helpers and construction labourers. We endure, with her, the indignities of sexual harassment that many young models face. The trapped, enclosed feeling of all these workers, mostly migrants, desperate to earn a living wage, is mirrored in the weather. What is missing in the lives of humans—what is absent, off-kilter—is echoed in the claustrophobically humid environments they are submerged in. Dunic’s drought-stricken tropical cities are blanketed in an oppressive dampness that is anything but sustaining.

The wealthy in the model’s cities, though, remain hydrated, surrounded by a lushness inaccessible to most.

But there is a cost, even there. Nature, whether it be a feral cat or a mosquito, is opportunistic.

I got a dozen mosquito bites today,
Am I going to get dengue?

[…]

You’ll be fine.
It’s only in certain areas.
Mainly rich people’s houses.
With their water gardens and soaked lawns.

Meanwhile, as, near and far, forests burn, and oceans fill with plastic, Snow, the princess, hungers for personal enlightenment.

In Wet, devastation can sow resilience among the working classes, but desire exists everywhere, in everyone, and is not necessarily always human.

We come upon lyrics, and repetitive incantations, as persistent, as plaintive, as the calls of an Asian cuckoo, the koel. Pages-long birdsong-like texts conjure visions of the loss of connection, of aching lovelorn bodies.

The author’s own black-and-white street photographs complement the model’s narrative, while also assembling their own. The photos seem purposefully grouped for open reading. Twinned, tripled, quartets of images invite the reader’s conjecture. I found the Buddhist and Hindu imagery when seen in association with natural elements (a cat, a turtle, a flower, for example), especially compelling. The mask-like placidity of the statuary—human representations of immortality—offers an uncomfortable contrast with a small living animal. In other photo groups, disquieting images of dolls and mannequins, empty streets, and solitary figures leave one feeling disconnected and lost.

Street photography, while random in discovery, requires careful capturing and framing of particular moments, just like the two narratives presented in Wet. As a form of integrated inquiry into the book’s poetic, it works.

Dunic employs primarily spare prose, skilfully manipulating the surface of the page. There are letters, songs, chants, dialogues, recollections, diary-like entries, stories. Spareness here is access, as she slips into, shifts from one form to another.

I do not think of this book as confessional. It is, however, deeply personal, in the way in which the personal can incite a kind of generational, cultural, class, or gender empathy in others, however different they might be from the author. Dunic’s ability to communicate this is a testament to her implacably creative voice.

How to cite: McDonald, Marsha. “A Poem Epic in Length, Powerfully Cautionary: Leanne Dunic’s Wet.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 12 Apr. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/04/12/wet.

Marsha McDonald lives in Vilar de Andorinho, Portugal. An artist and writer, she works and exhibits between North America, Europe, and Asia. She has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner, Puffin, Mary Nohl (travel), Lynden Sculpture Garden, Gallery 224 Artservancy (artist working within conserved land in Wisconsin USA), and a New York Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in Otoliths (Australia), The Drum and The Cantabrigian (Cambridge MA), Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Cha (Hong Kong), and La Piccioleta Barca (Milan). She has collaborated with artists and writers in the UK, France, Spain, Germany, Portugal, North America, and Japan. In 2024, she will be an arts resident at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland and Studio Kura in Kyushu, Japan. Visit her website for more information. [All contributions by Marsha McDonald.]

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