Days When I Hide My Corpse in a Cardboard Box

May Huang reviews a new collection of poems from Hong Kong.

Lok Fung, Days When I Hide My Corpse in a Cardboard Box, translated by Eleanor Goodman (Zephyr Press, 2018), 144pp.

It is an important time to be reading and writing about Hong Kong, a city that made headlines recently for its million-strong demonstrations against a proposed extradition law. Protests give us opportunities to observe how bodies, culture, and politics interact, as does Days When I Hide My Corpse in a Cardboard Box – a new collection written by poet Lok Fung (penname of Natalia Chan) and translated by Eleanor Goodman. Defiance occurs in subtle ways throughout the work, which centers on both domestic and public spaces. In the poem “Ion Lover,” a woman goes to the salon for “perfectly / ion-straightened hair,” a classic post-breakup hairdo, an act of self-affirmation. The hairdo does the job: the speaker is…