David Ly's Mythical Man

Reviewed by Amy Mitchell

(Palimpsest Press, 2020)

David Ly’s Mythical Man is a fantastic debut collection—spare and lively at the same time, oscillating among humor, longing, heartbreak, rage and transcendence, reaching sometimes for the utterly physical and sometimes for the mystical. It’s expansive without ever feeling like a random assemblage of disconnected poems (which can be a problem for collections, especially debut ones). Everything feels like it belongs, and the effect as a whole is of capturing the complexities and facets of the self—especially when the person in question isn’t white.
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The titular Mythical Man appears in four different variations in four poems, one in each of the four sections of the collection. In the first section, “Nod and Be Polite,” “Mythical Man (I)” is in very carefully and deliberately constructed drag, and the form of the poem (lines indented variable amounts, so that the effect is kind of an uneven staircase) emphasizes the deliberateness:

Enveloped in a bodice constructed
                from the exoskeletons
                                of Hercules beetles,
                lacquered shells
that catch the light
                in every pose,
                he flows down
                                a clinical runway
                in a silver taffeta gown …

In the second section, “Because I Am,” “Mythical Man (II)” is either the speaker or his partner, both of whom are caught in the uneasy desire of people to blur into each other while at the same time realizing the “futility” of this kind of dream:

We press against each other
                                so hard
                that I should just admit
I want to be
                absorbed into you,
                                                our atoms
amalgamating
until we become a hydra
                writhing
with one hundred hissing
                heads poised
                                to strike …

“Mythical Man (II)” carries through the form of “Mythical Man (I),” again emphasizing the deliberateness of these steps, whether in the dance of drag or of (possibly harmful?) relationships.

The third section is “Message Received,” and “Mythical Man (III)” abandons the form of the previous two iterations, becoming both very short and very personal:

This will only feel
like forever for now.
You are not small.
David, you can be good.
You did try. You do try.

Despite the line “You are not small,” the poem itself is small, and this contradiction quietly carries with it the ambiguities of the previous two Mythical Men.
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And finally, there is the fourth section, “Wild Spell.” “Mythical Man (IV)” preserves the form of “Mythical Man (III),” while suddenly opening up onto a mystical vista that transcends the focus of the other three Mythical Men poems:

Echoing my ancestors,
my hands rattle
every reachable, rusted lock
beyond belonging,
beyond what is understood,
what can be created or destroyed.

I think the complexities, ambiguities, and variations of these four poems capture both the shifting landscape of the collection as a whole, and the pulls the speaker feels among desires to be authentic, to be accepted, to escape the strictures (including racism and homophobia) of others, to achieve true communion with someone else, to recognize the limits of these goals, and finally to transcend all of them. Even the titles of the four sections—“Nod and Be Polite”; “Because I Am”; “Message Received”; and “Wild Spell”—echo these concerns, and also echo the ultimate progression of the collection towards something more (“Wild Spell”). The Mythical Man is the speaker, the men with whom the speaker longs to fully connect (both physically and emotionally), and the promise of myth itself—while it isn’t immediately true or realistic, it gestures towards something larger. It’s no accident that the final poem of the collection is “Walking Together at the End of the World,” which turns to apocalyptic fantasy scenes while also being explicitly self-aware about the fact that this is the product of the speaker’s imagination. Here’s a portion of the poem:

… We traverse hand-in-hand
 
across frozen seas, across engulfed metropoles
built to withstand the apocalypse, the ice
 
beneath our feet pulsating with the glow
of a skyscraper-sized cuttlefish.
…

​And here is the final line (the italics are original):

To what end are you imagining, David?

To an end that is out of reach, but that is nonetheless worth imagining, and the collection as a whole thus ends by inviting us to also imagine.
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Another aspect of the collection as a whole that many readers will feel drawn to is its grounding in the details and ugliness of daily, real life. Ly incorporates messages that he actually received on Grindr, and they’re as spectacularly awful as anyone who has ventured into the morass of dating and hook-up apps would expect:

“You’re cute but I’m not into Asians. Sorry just a preference.”
(from “Message Received”)

“…FORCE THIS WHITE BITCH TO SERVE YR ORIENTAL NOODLE!!!!”
​(from “Another Message Received”)

​Racism is front-and-center in these interactions, and it’s a problem that the speaker encounters again and again. The possibly most devastating example of it is in the one longer poem of the collection, “Stubble Burn,” in which it suddenly intrudes in the middle of sex:

I’m your rice queen slips
through his teeth and you swallow
salt. If cum splatters can be read
like tealeaves yours are
shaped like black beetles.

Because this poem (and many others) is so honest and direct in its details (“Doggy-style, doggy-breath …”), the reader feels the speaker’s vulnerability and thus the betrayal that is the appearance, yet again, of racist stereotypes.

An aspect of Ly’s language that I appreciate is his use of today’s idiom, with its incorporation of terms such as “bae,” “resting bitch face,” “silver foxes,” “IRL,” and “<3,” and of things like Lady Gaga lyrics. Perhaps the most impressive examples of using recognizable, twenty-first-century quotidian conventions are the two “Post” poems, which are each divided into the same three parts: “Snap,” “Filter,” and “Share.” The process of carefully curating your own life for others’ consumption (certainly familiar to anyone using social media in general, but especially platforms such as Instagram) is brilliantly depicted in these poems, in which “Snap” captures the complex and not-entirely-positive reality, “Filter” depicts how reality’s messiness is erased in order to present it as a flawless product, and “Share” contains the false-sounding captions for the filtered (and artificially perfected) products, followed by a barrage of “likes.”
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In short, Mythical Man is an entertaining, insightful, and carefully-crafted collection that showcases an impressive emotional and formal range, and I highly recommend it.

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Amy Mitchell is The /tƐmz/ Review's social media editor (as well as a writing editor) and a college professor. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Western University. Her reading tendencies have been described as "promiscuous"; she is interested in a wide range of fiction and poetry, and particularly enjoys finding new and interesting works in translation.