"Litany for the Long Moment is an assemblage of concise and poetic responses to unanswerable questions grounded in memory's combining powers, and in the pronouncements and obscurities of the personal archive and public document. It is a work that seeks to retrieve impossible-to-access reality, which extends through and beyond the singular experiences of poverty and diaspora of the author's early Korean life and unforeseeable future trauma in the American world of the new mother. Arnold's ... employment of commonplace items, such as a graph of the Hangul alphabet or the Korean television program questionnaire, which she uses as a compositional prompt throughout the essay, guides the reader through a terrain of never-settled fact, difficult desire, and obscurity of persons and histories that animate her excursion into zones of personal and philosophical doubt"--Page ix.
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