Becca Lawlor

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li, Someday I Promise, I’ll Love You.

London: 845 Press, 2022. $10.00.

Someday I Promise, I’ll Love You is Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li’s debut chapbook. This collection explores many emotional themes including identity, grief, and love. The speaker’s perspective moved between personifying a lost loved one to hugging someone’s body in the hospital. Embodying is a form of remembering—of preserving. However, memories are fallible, and time erodes them even if we try to cling to them. An image breaks up the poem “心” and the prose-poetry is disrupted by this visual insertion, similarly to how grief and death disrupt life. Another element used in this poem is the title. My “心” uses another language to connect to those who read Chinese without any exposition for readers who do not: “My 心—stopped on June 25th, 2017.” While we can translate this character to “heart” or “mind” in English, there was an intentional choice to leave this character in its original form. In this way, “心” reminds readers that some things like culture and grief can only be explained to a certain extent. Language has limitations and those who have not experienced loss, or read a certain language, can only understand so much. The collection’s title sparks more consideration and intrigue with the accompaniment of “the mezzanine.” Li expertly subverts pronouns and makes readers question: who? In the lines, “the mezzanine / does not welcome you/i.” and “When will you/i be loved?” readers are encouraged to wonder, who is “I” and who is “you”? These verses allow everyone to inhabit this poem, to be the speaker and the witness, to think more closely about who is speaking in the collection’s title: Someday I Promise, I’ll Love You. Li’s chapbook explores life after loss, and one’s inability to carry someone’s memory completely and consistently: time lessens pain along with the clarity of memory.

Becca Lawlor

Becca Lawlor is a queer writer and editor in their third year of the Honours Bachelor of Creative Writing & Publishing program at Sheridan College. They have short fiction story in The Bangalore Review, a review in CAROUSEL magazine, are a member of the Meet the Presses collective, and are working as an editorial intern for The Ampersand Review. Living in Mississauga, Becca reads most moments of the day while drinking lukewarm, over-sugared coffee.