回 / Return

Luan’s voice is almost shocking in its intimacy—reading this book is like suddenly being able to see emotions at the cellular level, across seas, through generations, between languages. Luan’s poetry pierces the surface of consciousness and swims powerfully into her own and our depths. Gorgeous, wondrous, genius.

Emily Lee Luan’s 回 / Return probes the haunted layers of racial melancholia, engaging familial tendrils of sorrow with a circularity that ultimately points to the stinging ache of no return. With gorgeous poems that breach and bridge the linguistic abyss, Luan guides us through a troubled-water poetics—“I heard the world as if through the belligerence of water”—in this sharp, prismatic and wonderfully radiant book.

The gift of 回 / Return is the poet’s ability to simultaneously plunge into the ache of diaspora and personal loss and invite the reader to consider the possibility and impossibility of wholeness. Emily Lee Luan, in a luminous debut, refuses to forget, knowing “my Sorrow was unafraid and it gave me back my bravery and anger.” And, rather than cede, invites and innovates through form, tongue, tenderness, and image. These poems are sigils carved from heartmemory to confront and restore.