[04/23/23] Luan, Emily: Return

Nightboat Books, paperback

Publication Date: April 23, 2023

Publisher Marketing: Through the recurrence of memory, myth, and grief, 回 / Return captures the elusory language of sorrow and solitude that binds Taiwanese diasporic experience. Rooted in the classical tradition of the Chinese "reversible" poem, 回 / Return is engaged in the act of looking back--toward an imagined homeland and a childhood of suburban longing, through migratory passages, departures, and etymologies, and into the various holes and voids that appear in the telling and retelling of history. The poems ask: What is feeling? What is melancholy? Can language translate either?