Long River Review, the University of Connecticut’s literary and arts magazine, hosted a poetry reading and open mic session on March 5 in the Stern Lounge of the Austin building.
The event was run by Kyle Barron, a Ph.D. student and the assistant director of the UConn Writing Center. This version of the Long River Reading Series is the third of this academic year, with the fourth and final event of the year occurring on April 2.
Barron’s guests for the evening were Grace Xiong, an eighth-semester student double majoring in molecular and cell biology and an individualized major in global health, human rights and food justice. Sophia Wallis Buckner was also in attendance, who recently defended her doctoral dissertation “Writing, Identity, and Genre.”
Xiong went first with a poem titled “Seconds,” which was about her experience with visiting a local farm and appreciating the imperfection in the food around her. Xiong described the jagged red line on a bruised tomato. Her next poem, “A Visit to the Nursing Home,” spoke of a nurse who has grown too old to live on their own and now must remain in a nursing home while their body slowly betrays them.
Xiong’s third poem, titled “Grandpa’s Hands,” came from a poetry class she had taken. She spoke of growing up in a multigenerational household with parents who didn’t speak English, and the changes in her relationship with her grandfather as she grew older and desired more independence.
“A man who mailed himself to America for us,” Xiong said, describing her grandfather in her poem. “A love too late to repay.”
Xiong’s final poem came from a poetry set. As a result, “Stretch Marks” has a much angrier tone as Xiong takes on the pain of a youth lost during a time of uncertainty.
“It was written shortly after the main peak of the pandemic,” she explained. “This is kind of like an ode, if you can call it an ode, to growing up.”
In her poem, Xiong touched on Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, the Sandy Hook shooting, her experience being Chinese during the pandemic and much more. “Hope in the face of this, is an art that we carry with us no matter our age,” she said, ending her poem.
Barron expressed his appreciation for Xiong’s poems when she finished. “Absolutely wonderful work,” he said, describing the journey Xiong’s poems had taken him on. He announced that there would be a short pause before Buckner’s poetry recital began.
Buckner noted that her own work was very similar to Xiong’s. Instead of poetry, she had brought excerpts from her essay, “The Untitled Body Project.” The essay features poetry, prose and Buckner’s thoughts on experiences she’s lived and books she’s read.
“It’s about identity, and the body and connection with the land,” Buckner said. “And what happens when those connections shatter in our modern society.”
Buckner’s first excerpt spoke of losing the land around her childhood home to a fire before losing her father-in-law to a heart attack. In it, she described wishing she knew the land and appreciated it before it left, a sentiment paralleled by her father-in-law’s death.
Her next excerpt spoke of the work of scholar Gregory Bateson, who saw nature as one big interconnected system. “There is no separation between self and that which surrounds the self,” Buckner said. “There is no self. My consciousness, my mind, my self is ‘not bound by the skin.’”
Buckner’s final excerpt touched on the book “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer. She had listened to the audiobook while putting her child to bed and wrote her thoughts on it. She touched on her relationship with colonialism as a descendant of it, and her desire to find a connection with land that was not hers.
“Perhaps if I built my relationship with the land, I could understand myself,” Buckner said. “I don’t know where to begin. I am a thousand miles away from the land with which I had the closest relationship.”
Barron then offered the attendees of the event to participate in the open mic portion. After he received no volunteers, he opted to instead read a poem he had written while he was still an undergraduate student. Barron read a poem called “Sawdust,” which he described as “hot garbage,” but spoke of the small town he grew up in. In Barron’s eyes, the town was filled with poverty and people who felt too invested to leave.
As the attendees of the event filtered out, Buckner noted that, much like Xiong, she had also written a poem about tomatoes. Barron added that he had a tomato poem of his own as well.