UNNECESSARY ROUGHNESS by SHIN YU PAI
reviewed by HEATHER NAGAMI

Unnecessary Roughness by Shin Yu Pai
(xPress(ed), 2005, available through lulu.com)

Playful, technical, deadpan, grave, precise, dynamic, daring—these are all words that came to my mind while reading Shin Yu Pai’s chapbook, Unnecessary Roughness. From playground dodgeball to bodybuilding, Unnecessary Roughness is a unique exploration of how physical activities shape our roles in society, our senses of self, and our sexualities. A skilled poet and visual artist, Shin Yu Pai utilizes her creative faculties to their fullest.

What struck me in the opening pages of Unnecessary Roughness was Pai’s recognition of the book’s physicality—its own identity as a work on paper—not just ideas, but a self-conscious visual creation. The first two pages offer diagrams of two familiar sites: four square and dodge ball. Each is partially a diagram (four squares, a circle), and partially a written poem. The former conjures feelings of both familiarity and disorientation (i.e. “Yes, I remember this,” and “What, I’m in a poem?”) with the added benefit of Pai’s embellishments, which include two concentric circles in the dodge ball diagram, instead of just one, eerily resembling a bull’s-eye. The latter, the words on the diagram, are an interesting mix of familiar playground put-downs (e.g. “scaredycat” and “baby”) and the more obviously consequential “fag” and “pussy” (7). These are mappings of hierarchies, the origin of names, and the nature of childhood socialization.

Pai commands great precision over her words and also her word processing software. In “square it up,” words and phrases trickle down the page diagonally, backward, and forward, resembling trails where a child might have run during a four square game. As a four square alumnus myself, this all looked too familiar, until I read the text, “bobbling,” “chicken feet,” and “serving bitch,” which I only later found (through some research on Google) to actually be technical Four Square terminology (6). Did Pai remember these terms from grammar school? Or is she, too, a Google researcher? I had to wonder. However, no matter how she might answer, this alien language pointed to a community that was more complex and intricate than I knew. This feeling resonated with Pai’s remapping of my own childhood memories.

While Pai uses her word processor’s palette freely, she also demonstrates the limitations of such a palette. Exclamation marks separate the vertical lanes in a swimming pool diagram in the poem, “wet area.” Judging by the imprecise spacing, I do not think that Pai used tabs; so I imagined her typing something like this: exclamation point, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, exclamation point, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, two-character word, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, exclamation point. This is a hands-on, laborious piece that speaks to the boundaries created within a societal system that stunts and discourages personal growth and creativity.

In Unnecessary Roughness, Shin Yu Pai exposes the grim realities that await us under the guise of children’s games and sports. The three poems I have discussed represent only a small portion of what I found in this truly unique chapbook. Pai uses a full and diverse range of poetic devices that, along with the integrated visuals, demonstrates her devotion to the arts. This is the first piece I’ve read by Pai, and I’m hooked.

An unnerving conjuring of adolescent dread and terror, Shin Yu Pai's Unnecessary Roughness utilizes visual and objectivist approaches to make precisely and uniquely discomforting poems. A vicious socializing process is enacted in Unnecessary Roughness , as is a mindset that is as ruthlessly competitive as it is often awkwardly sexual. A representative example of the book's major method, a kind of composite dramatic monologue, is “on the secret sex lives of bodybuilders,” quoted in its entirety:

hard on yourself
and hard on others

the cock isn't
a muscle that
grows in proportion

to a man's ego
I went out there
feeling like King Kong

atop the Chrysler tower
the heroine was heavy –
by building standards

she can weigh 150
pounds, I don't care
if she's a good fuck

having chicks around
is the kind of thing that
breaks up intense

training

everyone jump on
and we'll all
get together

oui
we

Interspersed between these sparse pieces are visual works, most set in familiar athletic grids: a four-square court, a track, a competitive swimming pool, etc. With impressive range and intensity, Unnecessary Roughness maps out the intersections of the American id.

- Tony Tost, Editor, Fascicle

Shin Yu Pai investigates the ugly side of sport that verbally punishes the weak, through poetry that reveals itself to be a hybrid child of wordplay and ball-play. Her language makes tense leaps, muscled thighs angled/poised between ballet flight and rugby tackle.

- Ivy Alvarez, Horse Less Press

Shin Yu Pai's most recent work, Unnecessary Roughness (2005), is a visual and linguistic maze that explores the insular world of high school athletics with a violent curiosity. It is also a chapbook in the classic sense -- it is a unified work in which all the poems direct their gaze towards sports, our idealization of sports from the beginnings of youth, and our societal obsession with sports with an unyielding focus. You will either like it or you won't.

To be truly appreciated, I think that Unnecessary Roughness should be read as a whole, preferably on one sitting (it's less than 35 pages, and the poems flow easily). This is why I am breaking from the recent pattern of posts again, apparently breaking from my own self-doubts about book reviews of poems as described in the previous post, and writing what is basically a book review here, as opposed to a review of any individual poem in the book. This review/commentary, of course, will necessarily be incomplete, but I'm hoping that it will be consonant with my belief that the best reading of the book is to read all the poems together as a unified entity.

In terms of style, about a third of the poems in the book are "visual poems," while most of the rest are of a more slender, traditional format. In general, I would argue that the visual poems work better than the other poems not just because of their stylistic ambition but because the ambition manifests itself in charming, innovative, beautiful works. In particular, take note of "dodgeball," "and round and round it goes," and "the wet area." Pai is clearly skilled at conjuring up unique patterns and anti-patterns and sensitive to visual space.

In terms of content, Pai intermingles themes of masculinity/ femininity, adolescence, sexuality, patriotism, high school athletics, and violence in sports with relative ease. The poems are not bluntly judgmental, but at the same time, they remain highly critical of a society mesmerized by the violence of athletics, which Pai suggests has subconscious sexual elements as well. At its core, the poems are also critical of the often physical, sometimes brutal nature of team sports, which function as a kind of proxy for the idea of a "fascist-socialist dictatorship" that conceals and distorts the individuality of human beings.

Reader be warned that the poems are not easy listening. The language and content of the poems are explicit though definitely not exploitative. In fact, Pai presents these issues/themes but allows us, the readers, to arrive at our own conclusions about whether, say, as in "P.E.," her criticism of team sports and school spirit is valid or not. In essence, as usual when we read poems, we carry our own heavy baggage into the poems and read them in light of the baggage that has formulated our personalities and perspectives on life.

As for myself, I have mixed feelings about the implicit contentions of the poems. You can say that the poems caricature high school athletics almost but not quite to the point of stereotype. Or you can say that the poems represent an intersting exploration of the subconscious underpinnings of high school athletics and sports in general. Or you can say both, and I say both. Actually, I like pretty much every sport and enjoyed my high school years, but at the same time, I recognize that most sports are violent and my high school years were no picnic either. In its most effective passages, Unnecessary Roughness captures the ambivalence of it all.

- Roger Pao, Asian American Poetry Blog