回 / Return

“Luan’s poetic reconstructions of the past vibrate with grace and lucidity. . . Her lyric transparency reminds us of the porousness of language, how our reception is what gives the poem signification, how necessary we are to making it live.”

In the style of palindromic poems built by Chinese characters, much of 回 / Return is dazzlingly multidirectional, challenging the eye to travel across areas of text in “reversible poems” that can be read down the page, first to last line, as well as up, last to first, each reading offering new meanings.

Luan experiments with language and poetic form, blending the lyric, narrative, and visual to create poems that resist translation. This collection insists on fragmentation and altered realities; the self is muddled and intertwined within a greater ancestral history.

Parting, sinking, gasping.

A book of both startling intimacy and formal excitement, neither compromising the other, 回 / Return is an assured and moving debut that navigates the murk (and heft) of the past. . . Throughout, 回 / Return takes up the Chinese “reversible poem” as a central conceit, using it to explore the limits of narrative desire, racial melancholia, and nostalgia itself.

There are an infinite number of things to say about Emily Lee Luan’s virtuosic 回 / Return. . . [the poems] are informed, inherently, by separation and distance; by missing, mourning, melancholy; by migration, exile; by the desire to return; by the impossibility of returning; by the disappearance of the past in the simultaneously centrifugal and centripetal force of the present.

Luan does not let the forms contain her, but instead carefully leverages each individual form to energize her verse.