Despatialized Intimacies: On David Gorin’s To a Distant Country
To a Distant Country
David Gorin
the Poetry Society of America, 2025
It’s not mere pathos that characterizes the Western elegy, but rather collegiality—often served with a side of wonder. From Walt Whitman’s tributes to Abraham Lincoln, to Czeslaw Milosz’s dirgeful solidarity with his poetic contemporaries in post-war Europe, the elegy has proven a sturdy model, capable of delivering the poet to their sources of camaraderie and affiliation—extant or posthumous, plainly stated or airily sung.
Today’s digital bonds breathe new life into the elegy, making it possible for a poet to cultivate, toward their subject, curiosity that collapses distances and apprehends loss with newfound vicariousness, solidarity, and care. In David Gorin’s To a Distant Country, winner of a 2023 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, the elegy becomes a site of transnational homage and dispatch, where remembering a far-flung confrère or an admired predecessor is to liberate them from political conditions that stifle memory—in so doing, providing a ready container through which news of the deceased can reach a broader community of mourners.
In the title poem, addressed to the poem’s own translator, Gorin remembers the Chinese literary critic and activist Liu Xiaobo as a “man of no importance” who “should be left alone.” The details—“He was in bed, / it was this summer, there were walls and a ceiling”—are decidedly bland in what reads like mimed passivity. It’s a choice tone, one easily mistaken for resignation. But it is aimed squarely at the Chinese government’s “great firewall,” a vast engine of censorship and control, and so paradoxically hints at the speaker’s resolve.
This poem, the chapbook’s first, is born in a moment of empathy for its addressee, who is mourning Xiaobo’s death. The speaker then ascends into a vicarious lament, figuring the dead as a vaporous materiality (“a pale fume bound / for a cloud”) suggestive of air travel—the unspecified yearning it inspires made precise: “At such a speed / clouds feel like sandpaper. The teeth of tiny frozen fish.” Such imagery, charged with its own lyric evocativeness, speaks to the atmospherics of the poet flying internationally with only his Notes app and a tenuous subject, some feelings in tow. Gorin captures the difficulty of recording these fugitive impressions—marshaled here in service of the elegy—through the use of juxtaposition and scale: Xiaobo, though deceased, even now “could be writing a letter to his wife / on a grain of rice.” The result is a passing salute informed by a secondary or peripheral grief, an elegiac conjuring that only ever intends approximation:
. . . But I imagine him
“To a Distant Country”
crossing a street in lower Manhattan
even now, umbrella in one hand,
phone in the other, googling the news,
no one to stop him. And somewhere on the Pacific,
a pillow with his breath inside, light rain.
To attempt to render his subject in such a fashion—as an anonymous bystander—achieves a prayerful mood on its own, but the scene is all the more colorfully rendered when infused with the sometimes sleek, sometimes staticky tones of digital life.
In another of the book’s elegies, “Salt for the Table, Steam for the Air,” dedicated to the Chinese poet and migrant laborer Xu Lizhi, the diaphanous force of memory confronts the material conditions of industrial labor inside the assembly plants where iPhones are manufactured—conditions oppugnant to life, liberty, and legacy. Lizhi, who worked for the electronics manufacturer Foxconn, committed suicide in 2014. (In the acknowledgements, Gorin thanks libcom.org, a news resource and archive devoted to class struggle, for “making his work and story available to me.”)
Poetic homage in the elegy has strong roots in war memorialization, national feeling, and other such encomia. In Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” the poet’s inner turmoil (“O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?”) is set against a shared American pastoral. Across the pond, Milosz’s “Winter,” a salute to fellow Pole Aleksander Rymkiewicz (“He was the youngest in our group”), transfigures a century of bloodshed on the European continent into a parting fireside meditation, clarified by Rymkiewicz’s death. In an age of hyperconnection that makes despatialized intimacies possible, Gorin’s affinities both extend and defy the old formulae. “Salt for the Table, Steam for the Air” bridges received relational barriers—those of language, geography, nation, class status, and the body—to register its solidarity, moving intentionally into a mutuality devised in that Whitmanian spirit, but shot toward a digital posterity.
In “Salt for the Table, Steam for the Air,” all features of cultural difference between speaker and subject resolve into the poem’s musical structure, a modest arrangement of semi-rhyming quatrains. The tears “fall through an aluminum funnel / and pass through a network of tubes” to find expression, becoming, quite memorably, “salt for the table, steam for the air.” This figurative, inexorable movement—like a passage through the blurred phases of grief, or as of the vitreous device itself in final assembly—traces the poet’s own pilgrimage in and beyond the poems against a life cut short; a subsequent allusion to Whitman brings a felt kinship (here, a masculine one) to the fore—a movement toward universality that’s harder to envision across a distance marked and magnified by screen-found information, but paradoxically mitigated by the vast archival knowledge smart devices, like the iPhone, grant. The final quatrain works all of this into a quiet summit: the possibility, however distant, that the very phone used to learn about Lizhi may have been manufactured by the poet-laborer himself, consequently swept into memory.
His poem on my phone replies
“Salt for the Table, Steam for the Air”
Who touches this touches a man.
This thing of power. When it dies
we plug it into the wall.
Perhaps it’s this elegiac interest in one person’s life—come and gone in a flash—that seems at once to distract from the speaker’s own interior and point to a humming liveliness there.
Much as the intercontinental flight rapidly induces and blurs vistas, the fluid and flight-like tendencies in these poems (like an “exfoliation of moving,” as the poem “Distancing” offers) cast the poet as a free-roaming cosmopolitan whose encounters with world injustice—from China’s techno-authoritarianism, to the recurring catastrophes in Palestine—inspire a duty-laden lyric that feels Whitmanian in scope, if willfully tailored to a somewhat disparate set of poetic subjects and concerns: teaching, travel, masculinity, sexuality, sexual assault, loving one and others, religious heritage, shyness and shame, and more. Structurally, the poems feel less a part of an assured whole than a collection of gleaming standalones. Indeed, the book’s progression is such that one feels compelled to linger over the acknowledgements, where, unsurprisingly, dedications abound, assigning names and particulars to a loose and leaping assemblage.
Distance, then—whether measured across geographies or between pages—becomes a central metaphor for the book, a deliberately vague accounting of a world beyond the self that is nevertheless circumscribed to its borders. Like an ice cream truck (“Everyone can hear it,” the speaker says in “Ice Cream at Eastern”), the emanations and vibrations of the self intrude on the efflorescence of poetic device and procedure. So, as the aperture narrows across the book’s looping chronology, Gorin’s surfaces as himself—if ambivalently; latent inner conflicts burst forward—at first, in the form of articulate abstraction, as in the prose poem, “An Actual Poem”:
The linden rags of autumn, the autumn of sable windows and
“An Actual Poem”
companion pieces—that’s what this poem should have been
about. But April—well, let’s just say it has a way of humiliating
you in front of all your friends. And so instead this poem has
become a condom of time, a reluctant officer of the peace,
with nowhere to go but down into the contagious privacy of
an old wound.
This inward turn—coming about midway through the book—feels somehow natural, weighted with a momentum that directs the reader to an underground source. Gorin slips into that “contagious privacy of an old wound,” a kind of muted self-reflection that eventually takes the form of the confessional “I,” calibrated to a slightly shier diaristic register. In what is the longest cycle of the book, a prose series titled “I Have Never Disappeared For Even a Single Instant,” disclosure becomes an aesthetic imperative, marked by an urgency that churns through the sequence. The poem’s stated inspiration is Alexis Almeida’s “I Have Never Been Able to Sing,” a series of short prose paragraphs with sentences that seem to plug emotion by swift redirection. The hybrid-prose model achieves a confessional intimacy perhaps much admired in today’s landscape of identity-driven self-portraiture—though both Almeida and Gorin steer clear of the associated tropes. Here are some of excerpts from “I Have Never Disappeared For Even a Single Instant”:
Sometimes when my parents call, I feel suddenly angry and
“I Have Never Disappeared for Even a Single Instant”
don’t answer. Something in me needs to make them wait.
Sontag wrote the answer is to be the one to make the call.
I wish I weren’t proud of having female heroes. I have wanted
to be innocent. I think it was the reason for an ambient
numbness I used to blame on post-modernity. It’s like keeping
a bed made for shame in the basement. My friend said of his
mother, “she’s taking all the blame, and thereby all the credit.”
The child I almost had turns ten this year. And then I think
the bed of shame is always an unmade bed.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I remember little of what happened in my childhood home.
There was an emotional anesthetic in the air that neutralized
whatever part of me was capable of a memoir. I fled into a
book or screen. I walked around a kitchen table, fantasying.
In my imaginary life, all the characters I’d ever loved in books
and films and video games appeared. We traveled the imaginary
world in a giant wireless computer mouse, with windows where
the buttons were. In the schoolyard, I spun around as fast as possible
and fell down on the grass. Trees ran their fingers over me.
The breathlessness of insight is tightly balanced against a concision that serves to fracture the flow of personal history before its generative force is ever pinned down. The resulting monologue is a portrait of both profound ambivalence and self-disclosure that recalls a childhood in which the screen has not yet monopolized the imagination—one woven as much with the concretely remembered as with the figuratively filled in (“Trees ran their fingers over me”). We’re left, in the end, with only partial scaffolding—enough there there to posit something like the kind of narrative plausibility surrounding a life, but not enough to hang your hat on. Much as Gorin works with sparsity to conjure his elegiac subjects, so the reader has to navigate the evasions, the recast or withheld contexts of a particular life, to piece together the main character as he is diffidently but movingly rendered:
I have never seen love between equals, and only rarely a love
“I Have Never Disappeared for Even a Single Instant”
that makes equals. When giving or receiving gifts, I look away.
It seems perverse that people with a lot of money can put it in
a house and take it out again, whereas for others the house is
like a river. I have gotten lost for hours at a time imagining
my future. It wasn’t that I thought I would become a star, it
was that I could, that it was still a possibility. The possibility
gave me a line of credit I could spend on anything.
Elegiac in its own right, “I Have Never Disappeared For Even a Single Instant” attends to what’s foreclosed: the unanswered phone call, the child never had, possibilities referred to in the past tense.
“Unable to locate a source of pain, I have used my imagination,” reads another line from this 10-page sequence, an inversion of Emily Dickinson’s, “You cannot solder an Abyss / With air,” in “To fill a gap.” But the air is suffused with steam; the iPhone’s rechargeable screen (“This thing of power”) flickers with something like the soul’s information trail: the ghostly materialization of people, places, and facts. So Lizhi and Gorin may seem unlikely—if not impossible—acquaintances, not least because Lizhi is no longer alive. And yet, Whitman says, “they are alive and well somewhere.”