At the End of the World There Is a Pond: Poems

“Love and death, suffering and addiction, family and displacement, all become interwoven into a commentary on the present intractable mess. Duong’s poetry assesses the situation with a jaundiced eye, yet his perspective also includes a stubborn hopefulness.”

In his debut collection of poetry, At the End of the World There Is a Pond, Steven Duong charts his personal battles with substance abuse, suicide, and displacement. These agonies become flashpoints for a poetic vision acid-etched with wit and humor. “Elon Musk is a supermassive bitch,” he drops that line in a poem. Someone has to point out the obvious, especially given the awfulness of the last election cycle. These poems confront troubling issues, but this confrontation is met with fury and rage laced with a black humor. “The Failed Refugee” ends with these lines:

“Sometimes history is a shrine

we plant together. It sleeps beneath the soil

like a land mine. Sometimes a scar is neither a street

nor a story, but a hyphen, a single line.”

Mr. Duong distills the traumas and humiliations of “hyphenated Americans” as “a single line.”

Throughout At the End of the World he has a series of poems entitled “Novel.” In these poems he parodies common tropes of literary novels with a grim humor. The first of this series begins:

“In a Chinese café disguised as a French

café I am writing a novel with no white

characters. My white friend says it’s beautiful.

My brown friend says it’s a suicide note

with an overreliance on voice & no semblance

of plot.”

In a later poem of the same title, he writes, “I am not yet sure what kind of lie the novel / is, but I tell it.” Later in the volume, a further poem called “Novel” becomes self-referential:

“The son is writing one too. He writes the

way I sometimes do, swinging the lyric

cudgel with abandon, waxing elegiac

for his mother & her brothers & the war

they didn’t die in.”

Death and survivor’s guilt remain a dual motif throughout the collection. The headline quote being how he is the “king of not killing / myself.” The agony of being alive is drowned in booze and pills. The ever-present threats of suicide and substance abuse sheds a harsh light on mental health and the challenge of self-care. In Duong’s case, self-care involves pills and wine. “Mao” has him confessing:

“If any of you are listening

please mail me drugs

I’d like nothing more

than to be full of Vicodin

& red wine

tracing the bones

of Zhoujiazui Road streaming

Uzi leaks through a VPN”

Duong’s poetry threads together apocalypse and despair, pop culture and global politics, personal confession and dark humor. He rhapsodizes about his favorite rap stars and then will write a sonnet to a mass shooting victim. In his own unique way, he captures American life from his vantage point in Atlanta. The American cultural landscape, this harsh, confounding, broken mess, is captured with his opinion that:

“a tattoo rig the best

pen for this long snaking poem

written between mortar strikes

in pastures of barbed wire[.]”

He writes poetry for those bruised and battered by the tidal waves of dreck and stupidity. Perhaps it is time to embrace the idea that “Some things a fist can do, a prayer / wouldn’t dream of.” Yet, in the same poem, “Lake Malawi Postcard,” he says, “I’m trying to be a man with hope in hand.”

His words are tortured and paradoxical as in “Our Love,” which “is thick & slow & heavy, like cement / poured down a rabbit’s warren.” These expressions fit best in the Anthropocene, this self-inflicted global ecological crisis. Love and death, suffering and addiction, family and displacement, all become interwoven into a commentary on the present intractable mess. Duong’s poetry assesses the situation with a jaundiced eye, yet his perspective also includes a stubborn hopefulness. His masterful debut collection leaves a curiosity to see more from this young promising poet.