Chorus Echo, a Review of Poems by Debora C. Ewing
(Igneus Press, 2025, $20), Buy this book
This book makes me think of Warring States (475–221 BCE) poet Qu Yuan’s (born c. 339 BCE) Li Sao (离骚, “Encountering Sorrow”), where the language of erotic devotion and abandoned love operates as a transparent allegory for political loyalty unmet by the ruler. The beloved is not a private lover but a figure for the sovereign—distant, capricious, and fatally susceptible to slander—while the poet-scholar pines for the good, true, and beautiful.
Debora C. Ewing’s poetic exile from the heart of her beloved may serve as less-than-transparent allegory for self-exile from our world. Political ideals constellate this book. In “multiverse,”
if time is a 4th dimension
then music is a 5th
somewhere deeper
there’s a cobweb
a series of threads
drawn in graphite
between a transistor radio
below my bedroom floor
a studio of sequential agreements
on where the tape should be cut
and one redding beech leaf
against foggy shale
all these things are
all the same
We find here a deeper cobweb, a drawing between and below, a tape that should be cut somewhere, and a beech tree cast against foggy shale. Levels go ethically deep, between, and below, dashed by an image of foggy shale, which is cool, moist, and hard, slick black amid madness. Throw it in with thread, cobweb, tape, and beech tree to build a polis of which Aristotle needs to be in charge, but Socrates is.
Kierkegaardian in her use of direct address, Debora C. Ewing has me thinking of roads not taken—spatially, where did those roads lead, and did they bend towards me. Chorus Echo’s “Author’s Note” is a first person address, disarming us with its familiar tone. Ewing confesses, confides, shocks, and negates us, “This is the anatomy of a crush. I need to confess: even though I address you, this is all about me.” First person polarises us to the background of ourselves. Yet she gives us her heart, but “would apologize” to her heart for that.
The book’s title poem, Chorus Echo, admixes color, “this song is the color of tank/ bolt & caterpillar,” “a dark flag raised against the sky,” “so many glorious shades of grey”. The book’s organizing metaphor, “chorus echo” is spatial. A chorus implies delay and distance. Between color and sound, “the sound of my bootlaces,” “This song is a blackbird/ in a dull sky explosion of bats/ against fireworks/ over a new orleans alley,” look how quickly she drags us by or senses into image.
Throughout the collection, love and loss reverberate as sounding instruments. In “refrain/ credits”:
this book is to remember
those days of tea and freer words
with a man of my own making
we’re gone too far into that desert
where everything’s a bone
and meat is precious
your soul becomes more
opaque with every liner note
a choice of font is permanent
but once upon a time
fox kits played in the snow
like old black & white movies
Political ideals are past tense, good with tea, with freer words. Times are bad now, there’s not enough meat to go round. Your soul (“us” again!) grows opaque outsourcing truth, good, and beauty. Revaluating our values, Ewing is Nietzschean!
Going back to the ancient exile, Qu Yuan, who threw himself into the river for the loss of his beloved ruler wrote:
Long did I cultivate inner beauty,
Adorning myself with fragrant herbs.
I gathered angelica and orchids,
Binding them at my waist.
But the woman I loved did not understand me,
And listened instead to calumny.
Here, the erotic register, with its cultivation of beauty, adornment, fragrance, and devotion, is clear. Yet within the Warring States political culture, these are virtues of the cultivated minister: moral refinement, ritual propriety, and loyalty. Debora C. Ewing is a cultivated minister in the houses of song, poetry, and image, always cultivating inner beauty. The book’s opening poem, untitled, reads:
if i wrote you a poem
i’d make something
nobody else would read
phrases pulled like fluff
from our brains at odd hours
like old vinyl trading cards like
snapshots of a holy place
the princess caught on film
a face flayed for crows
but i would never
because poetry distills
losing half the conversation
We know from this that any poem Debora writes for me is one meant for no one else. So much for the age of reproduction. We feel nervous, like it may not be worth her time. Indeed, the author launches into a moody diatribe against language, “phrases pulled like fluff/ from our brains at odd hours.” She then hurls three violent acts, “snapshots of a holy place,” the image that cheapens hierophanic space, “the princess caught on film,” we think of Lady Diana hounded to her death by the Papparazzi, and the most bloody of all, “a face flayed for crows.” Feelings impossible to capture. It was not worth her time to write us this poem, she tells us, “but I would never/ because poetry distills/ losing half the conversation.”
In the Chinese canon, there is also this distaste for language. It’s niche, but important. A foundational phrase in Chan (Zen) Buddhism is bu li wenzi (Do not create words or documents, 不立文字). Affectively, the phrase insists that experience precedes articulation. Enlightenment occurs before and often against the grammar that tries to contain it. In poetic terms: meaning happens before syntax. In Daoist discourses, in which we find a parallel sentiment, “dao de dao, fei chang dao (The Dao that can be spoken is not the constant Dao，道可道，非常道).” This opening line of the Daodejing establishes an ontological rupture between naming and being. Lastly, the Confucians also have it out for language, stating that ci bu da yi (Words do not reach meaning, 词不达意). Unlike the Buddhist and Daoist examples, ci bu da yi does not reject language as such. Instead, it articulates a moral–rhetorical anxiety central to Confucian thought: the fear that inadequate expression may distort ethical intention.
Chorus Echo listens to what language damages, to what love exposes, to what politics abandons. Ewing writes from exile without asking to return. Her poems echo because they must: truth arrives late, altered, and incomplete—and that delay is where meaning survives.
(Igneus Press, 2025, $20), Buy this book
