by Stan Galloway
Melanie Hyo-In Han is a global author who defies categorization. Witness her first full-length collection of poetry, entitled My Dear Yeast (milk & cake press, 2024). In “My ex had spent his entire life in one home:,” the speaker asserts:
The spreading of the partial list of country names across the page shows both the white space of distance between them but also the disconnectedness of them with no through line stitching them together. The African nations are vertically aligned, the European countries, likewise, align vertically, and each of the others, representing Asia, South America, and North America, have no vertical connection with the others. The collection demonstrates the global awareness of the author’s childhood and adult life, and it is the attempts at connection, and consequent relocation, that tie the collection together.
The poem “To Miss Tranquist” dives into the speaker’s identity. Her teacher found it easier to call on other children in class than to pronounce her name, Hyo-In. And through an entire school year, she was never called by name. “You [Miss Tranquist] were the reason behind my many fights / with my parents,” she writes, as she explains her name’s meaning in Korean, “wisdom from dawn,” held little comfort for her, since it was the source of her social exclusion. Her adoption of the Western name Melanie disappoints her parents, her new name containing “a hint of burnt caramel escaping between [their] teeth.”
“My Dear Yeast,” the poem that gives the collection its name, follows, exploring the generational conflict between the speaker and her grandmother over heritage. It is a thematic companion to “To Miss Tranquist.” This poem, in three parts, is the correspondence between the grandmother and granddaughter, real or imagined. Hyo-In is called Yeast by the grandmother in her cobbled English. She is trying to teach the granddaughter Korean language but recognizes the limited ability since her English is insufficiently developed.
In part two, the grandmother gives up “trying / to teach Korean / to a granddaughter / who kept refusing,” and returns to Korea. From there the grandmother is able to write to the granddaughter about why speaking Korean is so important. Under Japanese rule, the grandmother had been forbidden to use her own language and was forced to communicate only in the language of the occupying forces. This tactic for erasing cultures is still used today, for example, in Russia’s treatment of the Ukrainian people. The grandmother could only partially remember her own language when the Korean people were released from occupation. She concludes her letter: “Last wish for Yeast. Learn language.”
Part three of the poem is written in Korean, affirming the grandmother’s wish and illustrating a moment of growth for the granddaughter.
The author’s multi-cultural upbringing shows throughout the collection. “My Childhood Alphabet” begins with “African women on the busy, bustling streets of Harare,” acknowledging her early homes in East Africa. The poem includes not only cultural references but occasional Swahili words to further ground the poem geographically. As a companion poem later in the book, “Abecedarian in Hangul” returns to the Korean heritage explored in the earlier poems discussed.
“Holding On,” a small, powerful poem, does not name locations, but instead uses latitude and longitude coordinates, a technique that is both precise and obscuring, for identifying critical locations of trauma in her past. Here again, space is used strategically. In an interview with me for Pier-Glass Poetry Spotlights, she indicated the spacing of the four stanzas, moving from flush-left to flush-right and top of the page to bottom, serves to distance the events from each other while also holding them together through the page itself, a representation of the emotional distancing and displacement that the speaker of the poem tries to navigate. The spare language invokes childhood experiences in a straightforward and undeceptive way, looking at a younger self and choosing, finally, not to flinch away (by writing the poem), even while acknowledging the desire to avoid a direct gaze.
“Holding On,” as is true of most other poems in the book, first appeared alone (Anti-Heroin Chic, for this particular poem; 32 of 34 poems receive acknowledgment of previous publication in the back), and many were gathered initially in her chapbook Sandpaper Tongue, Parchment Lips (Finishing Line, 2021), a title taken from the opening poem of My Dear Yeast, “Drought, 1999.” The poems range geographically, showing that identity, and how one forms it, is universally part of the human condition.
The displacement theme continues in the penultimate poem, “five piles,” a poem about moving yet again, this time back to Korea. The five piles of the title are the process of sorting: toss, donate, sell, store, and bring. As with every relocation, something of the self is left behind. But the traumas of one’s past often are not. The poem concludes:
and as i sort things into piles, a tear slips into my suitcase
i guess i’ll be bringing that to korea with me, too.
Stan Galloway writes from the hills of West Virginia. He is the founder and host of Pier-Glass Poetry. He is the author/editor of 9 collections, including Savor: Poems for the Tongue (Friendly City Books, 2024).
