I COULD SAY this is a debut poetry collection that reflects a second-generation youth and adolescence in an immigrant family…and that would be accurate…but it would fail to convey how remarkable this book is.
When I say, “ debut poetry collection that reflects a second-generation youth and adolescence in an immigrant family,” do you think of a gothic hallucinatory trip streaked with black humor and populated with raccoons? Probably not. The book’s Amy Tan dimension is overshadowed by its Shirley-Jackson-on-mushrooms dimension.
It may just be due to the Action Books connection, but I sometimes thought of Lara Glenum, or early Ariana Reines.
The book’s most audacious gesture, I’d say, are the five poems, interspersed throughout the volume, in the voice of the poet’s mother at different ages (24, 30, 29, 43, 25). Amy Tan channeling Plath?
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