Poetry: “Against letting sleeping dogs lie” by Angela Cao

Angela Cao is ambitious with “Against letting sleeping dogs lie,” and she delivers—in just a short grouping of lines she is able to demonstrate with lyrical precision a coming-of-age narrative turned on its head, a story that all too many young people will relate to. Echoes of. other voices appear in these lines—Cao lets the speaker’s mother make critical and triggering comments early in the poem, and there is an epistolary quality when Cao mentions a “you,” while in other places it seems as if this narrator may simply be talking to themself. The final lines slip into a collective “we,” which implies a kind of growth of the group which was spying on this narrator, an insidious lack pf privacy and violation of her feelings of safety in the calm and quiet cul-de-sac. The poem is never predictable, even in considering the form. It moves in all kinds of exciting and surprising ways as the speaker’s emotions fluctuate through time and space, trying to reconcile their own identity against what is expected of them. Cao is redefining adolescent, no longer a painful and passive but necessary stop on the way to adulthood, it is a generative and powerful state where writing can develop, question, evolve, and help the speaker learn and process their own suddenly magnified emotions into a productive and even beautiful end product.