Return

A former Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, Emily Lee Luan is the author of I Watch the Boughs, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2021, Best New Poets 2019, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Rutgers University–Newark.

"Luan does not let the forms contain her, but instead carefully leverages each individual form to energize her verse."—Wen Eckelberg, International Examiner“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.”—Angie Sijun Lou, American Poetry Review"Luan’s meditative debut explores the Taiwanese diasporic experience through poems rich with vivid imagery, imagination, and candor that draw from the classical tradition of the Chinese 'reversible' poem."—Publishers Weekly"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."—Wendy Xu, BOMB"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."—Brandon Shimoda, Poetry Society of America"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." —Cindy Juyoung Okay, Harriet Books“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.”—Sophia Chong, Adroit"In 回 / Return, Emily Lee Luan’s stunning reflections on sorrow haunt the sensorium. This sorrow—or 'an anger rooted in sadness'—is untranslatable, rooted in the violence of colonization, displacement, and deracination. And yet Luan’s poems, which alloy Chinese and English into feats of formal ingenuity and beauty, translate the unspeakable. Read it once, then read it again slowly to perceive the spectrum of emotions Luan unseams with dexterity. 回 / Return heralds a potent new voice in poetry."—Cathy Park Hong"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."—Brenda Shaughnessy"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."—Sawako Nakayasu"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."—Anthony Cody