THIS TOO SHALL PASS
by David Yuen
Yuen reflects on the human response to hardship in this debut collection of poetry and prose.
The author writes in a preface that, over the last few years, he’s made it a point to sit down regularly and write a poem or short prose piece. The subjects of the pieces collected here are “current events, efforts to understand my own faith at a more intimate level, and reflections about whether people can still find peace and joy in life despite the things that threaten it.” The various phases of the Covid-19 pandemic provide topics for many works, but Yuen also muses on other world events, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Uvalde shooting, the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. There are essays of a more memoiristic nature, as well; “The Land of Saints and Poets,” for example, recounts an encounter Yuen had with a grieving couple at Blarney Castle during a trip to Ireland. Many pieces—the poems particularly—deal with God and Yuen’s relationship to faith. There are even a few fiction pieces, such as “Superman Does His Laundry,” which features the Man of Steel sharing his distaste for the titular chore. Batman shows up as a reference, as well: “My friend, Bruce, once asked me why I even bother at times, especially when good things don’t last forever and it’s only a matter of time before something bad happens.” To this, Superman imagines his response, which serves as a mission statement for the book: “Good is still good and bad is still bad, and those things never change. It’s all a matter of how we respond to it.”
The pieces are almost equally divided between poetry and prose. The poems are generally of an inspirational nature; they sometimes rhyme, as in “All That Remain” (“If I were to always think that my life was a tragedy / Then I would never know what it means to have victory”),but more often they read like prose essays broken into lines. The better poems are the ones rooted in the physical world, such as “The Violinist,” which imagines a musician in war-torn Ukraine, or the self-explanatory “A Poet Argues With His Coffee Over Coffee.” The prose pieces, though, generally make for better reading; when they tread into religious territory, they do so in a way that effectively incorporates aspects of Yuen’s life. In “A Meditation on Fasting,” for example, he writes about his attempts to feel closer to God by eating only one meal a day twice a week: “We are more than just biological machines hardwired with simple survival directives,” he writes in typically sensible prose. “We are spiritual beings who crave more, who need more than just physical nourishment….God wants us to be free just as He created us to be more than just flesh.” Christian readers, in particular, are likely to enjoy these faith-based writings, which strive toward a greater understanding of the world and the self.A thoughtful and varied set of spiritual poems, essays, and stories.