Paperback: 116 pages
Binding: Perfect-Bound
Art cover design: Tiffany Troy
Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
ISBN: 978-1-60964-441-3
Tiffany Troy’s cover art (her very own) employs a hyperverdant green‑and‑white contrast that imparts a printmaking depth reminiscent of neon‑lit impressionism. The central figure is faceless. Its jugular region is just a cut-off white oval. The figure appears to hold two bent straws, an almost ceremonial gesture, poised between ritual, professionalism, and control. The fine crosshatching lends the drawing its geometric authority and its dotted tie a taut precision.
Dominus (Latin for “lord” or “master”) inflects the cover with leverage, obedience self‑preservation, and the uncanny slippage between docility and power. The cover suggests a body created by capital until it becomes indistinguishable from the money it generates or the economic forces that shape it. Basically, an employable body that becomes currency: masked by money, doomed into making money, and finally made into money.
With a last name like Troy, “Helen” arrives unasked, spontaneously, and the Trojan Horse follows—trudging through the imagined city with its uncanny, un‑equine stride. Is Helen snow? Is Helen King Lear? An iPad wallpaper? An olive tree? Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn? Is Helen a bag of urine? “The Ashen color of dehydration?”
Tiffany Troy practicing law under the heliotropic, Flushing sun and poetry while swinging a lantern, and emerging from the same juridical orbit as Monica Youn, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Annie Kim, Wallace Stevens, Goethe, MacLeish, Masters, Bryant. And hoping to turn her poetry into a Trojan Horse? Perhaps not.
Her debut collection is an ode to the working class: their struggles. Their cries. Their tears. Her very own Beckettian lachrymal poetic coming of age to this hard, brutal neo-capitalistic world. Where one might slip into the silhouette of Anna Karenina if the mood demands. Mood being the sick and the dead. From pathological fatigue.
The narrative, hardcore arc is familiar: ascend into the skyline from bold ambition, then descend to the rails, where rats crack their muridic knuckles while hiding one’s tears inside the dark recess of her pockets (p.56). God sometimes appears against these wild leaping pages and might say things such as “Boo-hoo, crybaby” (p.59). Sometimes Odysseus shows up, “under sheep skin, his mouth still warm from Circe’s breasts”(p.63) and we want to be Troy too, squeezing our “breasts for milk before collapsing from fatigue” (p.68). In this economy, the body itself becomes the site of survival. The body becomes the wage. The labor becomes the sustenance. Never the money earned elsewhere.
From the coeval post-Covid now to the oldest chronology of myth, her collection governs like a Dominus, lord of the industrious spirit, detaining our lyrical pain in the company of diced fruits, truffles, tiramisus, chocolate cakes, and bakeries fighting to breathe. As if our Asian parents are responsible for shutting them down themselves out of disciplinary or Confucius compulsions. There is comedy here too: the speaker’s mother who misidentifies her daughter as the first Black Supreme Court Justice. Oliver Wendell Holmes isn’t black. Not only is he not black, but he has a very very very white bicycle handle mustache ! Yet one confusion must never be made—“a rat grilled in the oil of my conscience” is not the “Ten of Wands” (p.79).
Paris is the spark that should ignite the Trojan War, yet in Troy’s universe he never arrives. Without him, where does the war go? Troy sketches a self‑portrait of someone living inside a mythic framework where heroism fails to deliver, intimacy collapses under its own fragility, and adulthood becomes a burden. In this Me Too era, in a world where even eggs are recalled, we too feel like shells—thin, fragile, ready to split at the slightest pressure. A specifically Asian inheritance in which we don’t “specialize in disappointing the people we love,” shaped by expectations so towering they seem impossible to meet. And, all one could do is do a “futile stance” (p.77) “while people around [us] are getting married and having kids, [we are] chained to the bottom of the sea?”(p.11) .
Dominus, despite being dominant, commands us to be gentle to ourselves. To teach us that we are still very much neophytes swiveled by the tongue in cheek of teeth and tongue. And, without the hardship of being gentle to ourselves, the fun might never arrive. Fun as defined by “that’s how America works: You either cooperate or starve. I stand up and look out again: It’s lighter, the momentarily pink light. I care for these men who talked over me, the way I desire to touch the sky” (p.101).
Do I have the same desire? I ask myself?
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Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press). She translated Catalina Vergara’s diamonds & rust (Toad Press International Chapbook Series). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Co-Editor of Matter. Ms. Troy is the 2025-2026 Co-Curator of Poetry in Residence at the MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture. She is the co-curator of the “Queens Poetry Symposium” and bilingual readings at public spaces like the Flushing Town Hall, Queens Botanical Garden, Queens Museum, and Queens Public Library in Flushing. She has received a What Can We Do? grant from the Asian American Art Alliance and a Queens Art Fund New Work Grant from the New York Foundations of the Arts and the New York State Council of the Arts.
Vi Khi Nao is a queer Vietnamese-American writer working across poetry, fiction, theater, film, and collaborative art. She won the 2016 Nightboat Poetry Prize for The Old Philosopher and the 2017 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize for A Brief Alphabet of Torture. Her latest novel, The Italy Letters, was published by Melville House. A former Black Mountain Institute and the current 2024-2025 Iowa Artist fellow, she was awarded the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize in 2022.
On page 95, I wonder if the colors of the poem’s text shifted from black to light gray. If that choice was intentional. Quite poetic, I might add, if it’s intentional. As one’s thoughts actually fade. That fading continues to page 98 before it resumes its full darker inkage. In printed format, it’s easier to notice. On a digital screen, such gradient can only be seen if one really scrutinizes.
A rat grilled in the oil of my conscience!—Killer. 🖤