In Bridget Huh’s first collection of poetry, the polyphonic and synaesthetic Fugue Body, she writes, “Spanish distinguishes between two ways of being. / One that fluctuates. / Another you cannot escape.” It is within this precarious dialectic that Huh’s Fugue Body suspends itself, paradoxically “galloping / motionless” with an urgency whose tempo you cannot help but match your heart to.

The collection is astoundingly virtuosic as far as first books go. Huh writes like she is already a “Master Poet,” to use Xi Chuan’s category for those who spend their whole lives honing their craft (as opposed to “Prince Poets” who flare and then go out at a young age… Arthur Rimbaud comes to mind). There is wisdom here. Huh writes in one of her many poems on the subject of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, “To speak of gaining or / losing time is to use the / wrong language entirely.” Sibelius notably spent the last thirty years of his life in “silence,” working unsuccessfully on a final symphony. What is time? What is a body in time? What is it to hold time in bodies? (Or to have time lift or saturate a body, as the Korean verb 들어 in “Touching the Verb” allows us to imagine?) These are questions Fugue Body presents to us.

The collection (notably of poems as portraits, orchestras, arias, odes, suites) holds space for both great despair and great beauty. Huh writes of the vicious hate crimes against Vincent Chin in 1982 and Noel Quintana in 2021; she writes of the speaker’s 71-year-old piano teacher with whom “the real problem […] / is that I cannot cut into him, unpeel his body / to reveal his secret and innermost / white person thoughts.” In this work, akin to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, whiteness (white bodies) refuses to answer, time and again, the questions it is enclosed in. Huh writes, “Exchanging one violence for another. / An old kind of currency.” Yes. Hannah Arendt determined that thinking is not about coming to conclusions; it’s about being able to ask unanswerable questions. Likewise, James Baldwin said the purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers. Fugue Body lives up to this high calling. And sometimes the unanswerable is found in the beautiful. Huh’s lines also lift and hold us in wonder: “Is it the sight of swans? / That lifts in the throat?”; “These notes which / glaze light / in a colour!”; perhaps against Rimbaud’s je est un autre, Huh writes, “I’m up to my neck in I’m / and I’m beautifully.” My favourite line in the collection is the one that doesn’t end: “If I will get nowhere / listening only to the beautiful.” This is the nowhere I’d like to get to.

The word fugue takes its root (fuga) in both “flight” and “ardour” which reminds me that Homi Bhabha wrote in The Location of Culture, “the state of emergency is also always a state of emergence.” Huh’s work resonantly holds, lifts, saturates both sides of the dialectic as fall leaves hold colour: “I have lived in the manner of a dance / a contratiempo which is to say / against the time but with // the music.”