Return

by Emily Lee Luan

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 What is feeling? What is melancholy? Can language translate either?

Genres: Poetry, Death, Asian American

97 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 23, 2023

About the author

Emily Lee Luan is the author of 回 / Return, a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and I Watch the Boughs, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2021, American Poetry Review, Lithub, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Rutgers University–Newark and is a 2023–24 Visiting Assistant Professor in the Syracuse University MFA program.

Reviews

[tiff · Rating 4 out of 5]

so inventive - literally in love and ab to burst into tears

[Connie · Rating 5 out of 5]

One weekend, I fell brain over toes for this remarkable debut collection about food, grandfather-love, loss, and Taiwan. Beautiful pieces like “Lunar Year,” “When My Sorrow Was Born,” and “Sunflowers” hitched my breath in my throat. In 回 / Return, my eyes were drawn to all of the water: rivers, sweat, a pool, saliva, a runoff, lakes, rain, a draining sink, and ocean. I can’t wait to hold a hard copy and trace liquid across the pages, savor the brilliant language, and scribble notes in margins.

from “10 Essential Poetry Books by AAPI Authors” via BOOK RIOT: https://bookriot.com/must-read-poetry...

[Aerie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love how writers like Emily have challenged traditional boundaries/ how poetry has progressed in these modern times such that I may read a line that is:

I 哭 and 哭 and 哭。

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sorrow. A deep family sadness rooted in Taiwan, which the poet will not escape, or the book doesn’t intend for her to escape it. Which, for me, is one of the book’s biggest risks. Because sorrow is intense, and the poet is not timid about registering what makes her sorrowful. It’s like water around her, or her as water, or if you’d been the main character in a story, and you jumped into a well, and all you can do is explain the color of that water around you, the character, that is sorrow. And all these are images used by Luan to elaborate on and express this sorrow, to fill in the frame proposed at the opening, with each poem like a portion of a Sorrow collage, a family bracketing the poet’s life with sadness, the poet always aware of the sadness that had built her life.

The risk that registers for me about midway through the book is sustaining a thematic or tonal point like this. For my reading, this isn’t a comment on what the poet has experienced. It’s a book giving voice to that and sustaining it. If a book proposes itself as a book that will express sorrow, how much will the book’s frame lead the poems versus how much sorrow will be present because it can’t not appear. It’s like elegy and mourning in Marie Howe’s What the Living Do: Poems. Every poem is grounds for Howe to revisit this horrible tragedy. And, for me, every poem in that book sustains the sentiment, because each circumstance feels like a fresh consideration of life. Like each poem shows the poet struggling with life in the face of what she knows about a horrible death.

In this book, Luan opens with sorrow as an immediate presence. Like the present tense of presence, and each poem is an expression of what the poet was encumbered with. As the book progresses into the middle sections, sorrow feels more like sadness, and maybe it’s the sadness of growing past childhood. This is the moment I find the riskiest. Because an elaboration of growing into a young adult, where the clash of previous personhood as a child and teen rooted in a family structure contrasted against the new adult personhood borne out of separation, and possibly alone, it’s hard to see how that matches with the book’s proposed frame. Not that that kind of sadness isn’t deeply felt. But I don’t know that I would personally match the sadness of my 20s with the sorrow described in the beginning of Luan’s book.

However, Luan’s book embraces this risk. I wouldn’t have read the two sadnesses being matched. And then Luan closes with family legends based on a great-grandfather as a young adult, and a grandfather as a young adult, and a father, before he had met her mother. And I see what the poet has to reckon with as she lives through the transition to her adulthood. What is a story? What exactly is the sorrow these ancestors encountered, and how might her experiences in the United States be told in a legend?

[Olivia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Return by Emily Lee Luan is one of the best uses of circular poetry and shape I’ve seen. Lee Luan manages to integrate simple, but distinct shapes in her work that are still legible to the reader in a way that is both metaphorical and enjoyable. One great example of this is “I could make my way through the grass” which features a round title that works no matter where you start, “the grass I could make my way through” or “my way through the grass I could make”(64) and keeps going around and around. In the same vein, the poem can be read circularly because it almost only features variations of that same line (slight variations in words do occur). Because of the extreme repetition in this piece it makes the syntax extremely interesting because the sentence structures slowly start to deteriorate as the piece progresses. Towards the end, the lines make less and less sense “Could I grass, could I way-make? I grass, I way-through, I make.”(64). I liked how this portion felt almost like a deterioration of the narrator’s sanity, as I said the other day like when you keep repeating the same thing until it loses meaning. The tone is also really interesting in this piece because despite little to no change in the words it still reads as very desperate and rushed, and I was impressed that she was able to do that while keeping the integrity of the original phrase. For me, Lee Luan wrote this poem specifically to explore the deterioration of the phrase, seeing how far it could go down before there was nothing left to say.

Another poem that employed this accessible shape language was "Reversible Poem in Laughter”. Although the shape wasn’t different from a “normal” poem it has the reversible quality meaning it can be read either way. I liked the intentionality behind this piece and how it plays with the opposing stories depending on how you read it. If you read it top to bottom, it reads as the narrator emerging from the water, but if you read it from bottom to top it reads as the narrator plunging into the water, which I found super interesting. I think that this poem is intentionally difficult to read because the narrator wanted it to be shrouded in mystery. Is the narrator constantly diving back in, or are these two separate stories? Lee Luan has such a distinct voice combined with this continual conversation of sorrow and anger that I really thought worked!

[andré crombie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The grey night, walking home, we found
sunflowers leaning against the fence as heavy
as heads. In the morning, you held my head
in your palm, and we stared at each other down
the long length of your arm. We swayed together,
if only for a little while. Then you kissed my toe
and left. I pulled the comforters out after.
You had sweat the bed; the room bloomed
with your sweetness.

Notes: Beautiful, affecting language, structures, and many

Walk me along the barren summer to the cacti withering on the avenue.

marvelous

I’ll be naked, swallowed by mosquitoes, a constellation growing from the two bright stars of my nipples.​

sentences.

When my Sorrow was born, I held it, a dark pearl spit from its shell, and I remembered the salt that had rounded it, centuries ago, before I even had a mouth.

[Mercer · Rating 4 out of 5]

luan does a lot to unpack the ideas of depression and grief. her ultimate takeaway: perhaps sorrow is not the self-destructive thing we think it to be; rather, it is alive, breathing. it doesn’t wish to be anything other than itself. and in that way, luan’s sorrow saved her from her depression, and from flinging herself into the river in the dead of winter.


“desire seemed to bring with it a pathos of distance and separation which it was futile to deny.”

“it is like caressing an urn or a ball, something that is all surface.”

“i have been cutting my hair to be kinder.”

“i’m worried my mother knows i’m worried about her.”

“all emotion feels to me a kind of performance. i’m trying to unlearn that now.”

“when i don’t feel pain, is it joy that pours in?”

[indigo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm sorry this one really just fell flat for me. something about no breathing room in it for all the sadness it holds. and the sadness never transmutes into anything else it's just like hear me this is my pain and overly narrative heavy. that being said there are some good poems in here like some I would reread in a few months time and [return] to hahahhaha. the visual poems are ok like it was verrrry tumblr sadness to me at times. I dont know it's a certain level of AAPI polished poem and very predictable form like most poems end on a metaphor and it feels to me like she doesn't let the emotion come through all the way, like had to curtail it for the sake of "craft". sorry again I had high hopes for this one but kind of like a lanthamos film brilliant idea disappointing execution.

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

the grass I could make my way through the

I could make my way through the grass.
Could my way through the grass be mine?

Make me thoroughly grassless.
My way through—the grass I make.

Wales's, grass through my making.
Throughout the grass—I could I could I could.

The grass is mine to make.
Grass, I couldn't make my way through you!

Grassless me, away.
The way through me is to make me grass.

Through my making a could, grassing
wayward, through to me.

My make is grass, all the way through.
Makeless me, the through-grass weighs me.

Could I grass, could I way-make?
I grass, I way-through, I make. (64)

[el · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lackluster diaspora blues

Favorite poem: 捨得

"My grandfather and I eat a steamed trout...I offer him a fish eye. Together, we chew them to seed. Each of our eyes, in their dead way, swivels and blinks to each other from our stomachs." (49)

"Always the predisposition
toward loneliness...

...It's possible
to be without and not know
what you're missing
to live with the part
of yourself
that trails behind." (57)

"I imagine his body disappearing into white, his full head of black hair the first exclamation of a calligrapher's brush on rice paper." (93)

"...as a fire
believes, with its mouth open, that the black
sky will continue flooding into it." (94)

[T Brown]

Lovely. The well, Taiwan-Japan-China, circle-hole, birds, deer, water, drain, black-blue-white, room, grandfather. Clever incorporations of Mandarin and English historical moments as a shell to shatter, ingenuitive formatting styles.

[miao · Rating 3 out of 5]

none of the poems hit 🤧

[mckenna⭐️ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
(another book for class)
the only thing that had me going was the little bits when she mentioned her relationship w her mom. that had me sad fr

[Madalan · Rating 4 out of 5]

absolutely gorgeous book!! I loved these poems so much and found them incredibly captivating

[Megan Pinto · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn’t put this book down! A stunning debut. I can’t wait to see what Luan writes next.

[Shannon Hong · Rating 5 out of 5]

回家？a chapbook which did speak to me, and makes me think i don't understand a lot of poetry because they're not for me

[S. Fey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning. Instantly one of my favorites. It was hard not to tab every poem.

[Lynn wilcox · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love poetry

[bella]

And in the. blackest hour of morning my head calls back my body, like the bird that circles high above, singing 回、回、回。

[Jade · Rating 5 out of 5]

POETS!!!!