A Place To Belong

Souvankham Thammavongsa finds her home in poetry

- Anita Lahey

At sixteen, waiting out a bomb scare at her high school while next to a display of dissected insects, Souvankham Thammavongsa wrote a poem called “Frogs.” She treated the poem as if it would be her last. “I didn’t want to go out without it being my choice — or at least without an argument,” she said in an interview. “I was angry.”

Far from her last, “Frogs,” which appeared in her 2003 debut, Small Arguments, became what she considers her first “real” poem. Realness refers to how poetry, for Thammavongsa, should feel like a well-built table, and “no matter what anyone does to it or says of it, it doesn’t wobble.” It also means a poem that readers can’t leave behind. “I hope I’ve said something there that matters. And that they carry that with them wherever it is they mean to go.”

“Frogs” contains nine lines, twenty-six words, three commas, one semicolon, and no periods. Like its companions in Small Arguments, the poem is exceptionally spare. At first glance, readers might mistake Thammavongsa for a member of the “insta-poet” generation: a group that includes global sensation Rupi Kaur and whose Instagram- friendly affirmations — easy to skim on a smartphone — marry well with snappy social-media discourse.

But Thammavongsa’s poetry isn’t designed for quick consumption or feelgood moments. “My poems don’t think for you,” she has said, “they think